Jennifer's Laws · VI. Transparency & Public Oversight of the Courts
J-Law 44 — Public Access to Every Filing
Every court filing shall be publicly accessible, with all personal identifying information — names, addresses, and contact details — redacted.
Court filings tell the true story of the system: what parties actually argued, what evidence actually existed, what a judge actually had before him when he ruled. Sealed and inaccessible filings leave the public with only the official summary of events — and official summaries, everywhere in government, diverge from the record precisely where the record is embarrassing. Trust in courts requires the ability to check the courts, filing by filing.
Redaction technology makes the old privacy objection obsolete. Names, addresses, and contact details can be stripped automatically, protecting the individuals inside a case while exposing the conduct of the institution processing it. Researchers could document patterns across thousands of cases; journalists could verify claims of misconduct against the actual paper; ordinary citizens could read what really happened in a case they heard about. An open society keeps its official records open.
The expected counterargument: even redacted filings can be re-identified, and universal access will chill litigants from filing sensitive matters. Re-identification risk is a design problem with design solutions — redaction standards, sensitive-category protections, and tiered access for genuinely dangerous information all exist and improve yearly, and the law's redaction mandate incorporates them rather than ignoring them. The chilling argument deserves comparison against the current chill, which the objectors never mention: people decline to seek justice today because they know the process is unaccountable, and unaccountability grows in sealed records. Perfect anonymity was never the historical baseline anyway; courtrooms were public and filings were paper anyone could pull. Choosing institutional opacity to protect personal privacy buys neither — it simply relocates the risk onto the public, which loses its only means of watching the watchers.