Two Steps Back - Oklahoma Returns to 1982
UPDATE****3/26*** The Court withdrew its order on a 5-4 vote to restudy the internet access issue. Hopefully, the Court will retain the new rule requiring exercise of care when putting individual identification information in public pleadings. But, internet access to court files should be retained.
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The Oklahoma Supreme Court, though not unanimously, hurled the Oklahoma Court system backwards with such force the court system is now back in 1982. Pleadings are no longer available on line from the Oklahoma court system’s internet presence, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network.
This action was imposed unilaterally by our highest and usually most sensible Court for the stated reason that it would protect privacy. Forgetting for the moment that the other way the Court addressed it, by passing a rule limiting personal and financial information disclosure, was the only effective way to address it, the Court’s fear of gadgetry was both humorous and sad.
Pleadings are public records that can be viewed at any Court Clerk’s office, so the court did not remove them from the public sphere, but just made them harder and more expensive to review, because now it takes a trip to the courthouse to view and copy the pleadings. The Court just reduced the convenience of review by eliminating the instant review possible on line. Because court dockets and court cases can still be searched on line, the pleadings can still be easily identified, as can the parties to law suits. Exact identification of parties might be harder, but that only is true until one makes the trip to the courthouse to review the pleadings.
Of course, only 80% of Oklahoma’s court system was ever on line, not all 77 counties were on line, and only in one or two counties could every pleading be accessed, although some access was available to pleadings in all the counties that made up the 80%. Nevertheless, our Court system seemed quite modern and efficient because of this access.
The great contradiction, and the humor, in our high court’s pull back from the 21st century, is that the unstated and underlying premise has to be that Oklahoma state court pleadings are somehow more valuable and more dangerous than federal court pleadings. Every federal court pleading in the United States, much less in the federal courts sitting in Oklahoma, unless under court ordered seal, can be downloaded for eight cents a page on the Pacer system.
The great sadness resulting from Oklahoma’s action is that because of the Court’s failure to reconcile the virtually complete access to federal pleadings with Oklahoma’s sudden phobia about access, the Oklahoma action seems to be reactionary and parochial.
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