This afternoon the judge kicked media out of Florida redistricting trial. GOP operatives testifying.

[Jim Lane]

6. In the first instance, the trial judge. This is an established legal principle.

Private companies do have trade secrets, and individuals have legitimate privacy concerns. It happens sometimes that, to balance the litigants' need to use the information against their desire or another person's desire for secrecy, the compromise that's reached is that the information is provided to the attorneys but can't be disclosed more broadly. Any briefs or other papers that use the restricted information are filed under seal and are not available to the general public.

An attorney quoted in #4 seems to say that everything considered by a court should be made public. That's way too broad. There might be a corporation with a trade secret that would benefit its competitors. There might be an individual who's suffered some kind of injury that he or she doesn't want made public. While it's true that the secrecy does impair the public's right to know, it's a reasonable compromise provided it's not done to excess. That's why it's up to the judge, not the litigants, whether to accept a particular request for secrecy.