SDNY COURTHOUSE, July 12 – Inner City Press
covers and litigates for access to federal court records,
from the EDNY to Colorado to California. But transparency
is not only won by intervening — some judges get it right
on their own.
So today, the first in a series on
unsealing decisions in cases Inner City Press did not need
to file in, because the court did its job. Consider Hender
v. Nike, Inc., 3:18-cv-01477, in Nike's home
District of Oregon. The case is a survivor of the gender
discrimination litigation filed against Nike back in
August 2018, in the wake of the internal survey and revolt
that shook the sneaker giant's Beaverton headquarters.
Eight years on, with trial finally set to
begin, Nike filed a motion asking that third-party
employee names be redacted from the plaintiff's trial
exhibits. It filed that motion three days before trial —
and long after the pretrial order's June 8, 2026 deadline
for confidentiality disputes.
On July 11, Judge Amy M. Baggio denied it,
on both grounds and then some: Nike "largely relies on
generalized assertions of purported compelling reasons"
rather than concrete examples of harm, she wrote. She
anchored it in the Circuit's standard: a court may seal
"only when it finds a compelling reason and articulate[s]
the factual basis for its ruling, without relying on
hypothesis or conjecture." Center for Auto Safety v.
Chrysler, quoting Kamakana.
Compare that to what Inner City Press
confronts weekly: GEO Group's serial requests to seal
entire summary judgment records in the Eastern District of
California; a German § 1782 applicant asking the Northern
District of California for secrecy because Germany lacks
PACER; Stateside Brands moving to seal its whole summary
judgment motion in Philadelphia until Judge Kearney said
no within hours.
The law is not dissimilar in different
Circuit — Kamakana in the Ninth Circuit, Avandia in the
Third, Lugosch in the Second. What varies is whether
judges apply it unprompted - and whether the judge accept
Press submissions challenging oversealing, filed by email
or otherwise. The Hender trial begins this week in
Portland, on a public record. Inner City Press will be
watching — and will keep noting, in this series, the
judges who need no motion from the press to remember whose
courts these are, and those who be contrast need it, and
what they do. Just do it, indeed. Watch this site.
