More On Sealing Divorce Records

Marcia Oddi at Indiana Law Blog posts today Judge halts public access to Shine divorce papers, linking to the story from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. "A special judge has sealed the divorce filings of Allen County Republican Party Chairman Steve Shine." She has reported a number of similar stories over the last few years and links to them at the end of this post. We have reported on sealing/unsealing of divorce files here, but the Florida outrage and secret dockets issue seem far different than the case-by-case closing of select divorce files in Indiana and in other states. Sometimes there are very good reasons where harm to the litigants or their children outweigh the public's right to know.
One thing leads to another, and in digging through Marcia's prior posts I discovered the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a site worth perusing.