Eddie Tardy v. Corrections Corporation of America, nka CoreCivic, et al.

In Public Citizen v. United States Department of Justice, 491 U.S. 440 (1989), and Federal Election Commission v. Akins, 524 U.S. 11 (1988), this Court recognized that Article III’s injury requirement is satisfied when a litigant seeks to vindicate a right of public access to information. If that principle is true for ABA judicial evaluations and records of political activities that an organization is required to disclose to the public, it is doubly so when an individual seeks access to improperly sealed court records. The Sixth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion here, holding that a member of the public lacks standing to intervene and unseal court documents unless he also shows personalized “adverse effects.” App.7a. As the dissent explained, that analysis “fails to heed” this Court’s decisions in Public Citizen and Akins and places the Sixth Circuit “at odds with [its] sister circuits.” App.10a (Gibbons, J., dissenting). Though “the public right of access to judicial records is deeply rooted in Anglo-American history and tradition, the majority’s holding suggests that the Constitution prevents any specific member of the public from vindicating that right.” Id. at 16a–17a. The question presented is: Whether an intervenor’s interest in transparency is sufficient to confer standing to seek access to sealed or protected judicial records (as the First, Third, Fourth, and Eleventh Circuits hold); whether an intervenor’s standing turns on whether the underlying case is still pending (as the Fifth Circuit holds); or whether an intervenor must show personalized “adverse effects” to seek document unsealing (as the Sixth Circuit held here).