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OCBA Leads Coalition Amicus Brief Supporting OC Superior Court, Successfully Defeating Preliminary Injunction Request

The OCBA, alongside public interest organizations Family Violence Appellate Project, Legal Aid Society of Orange County, Public Law Center, and Veterans Legal Institute, submitted an amici curiae brief in district court in Santa Ana in opposition to a preliminary injunction motion brought by Courthouse News that sought to prevent the Court from continuing to screen to protect litigants’ statutory rights to privacy (including the identity of domestic violence survivors) before releasing these filings to the press and the public. OCBA Board Member M.C. Sungaila, an appellate partner at Haynes and Boone, and her team authored the brief, which explained that certain litigants have both a federal and state constitutional right to privacy as well as a statutory privacy right over all or some of the information in complaints filed by or against them and that requiring the release of these complaints to the public before the Orange County Superior Court could complete its review of the complaints for confidential information would place these litigants’ right to privacy at risk. The brief urged that any qualified right of Courthouse News Service to timely access complaints should be weighed against litigants’ right to privacy, and that as a result the Court should hold that the litigants’ right to privacy outweighs any qualified right to access complaints before they are reviewed for privacy concerns.

Earlier this month, Judge Andrew Guilford denied the preliminary injunction, reasoning in part that “[i]f, as [Courthouse News Service] would have it, these newly filed complaints were made immediately available, significant privacy interests would be at risk” and concluding that “the interests that would be served by [Courthouse News Service’s] proposals are dwarfed by the burdens it would impose.”

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