The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has refused to allow the sealing of settlement agreements in two civil actions, citing the “presumption of public access to judicial records.”
Regarding one of the cases, Judge Richard Posner wrote, the information is important to future negotiations over attorneys’ fees in cases in which the plaintiff is a minor. “[N]o good reason—in fact no reason at all—has been given for thinking that concealment of the information would serve some social purpose,” he wrote.
