I thought I'd pass along this friend-of-the-court brief that I just filed a couple of days ago in the Ohio Court of Appeals (Doe v. Roe), with the help of invaluable local counsel Jeffrey M. Nye (Stagnaro, Saba & Patterson) and UCLA LL.M. student Bhavyata Kapoor.
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This is a garden variety defamation lawsuit of the sort that is routinely litigated in the parties' own names. Many defamation litigants would prefer to avoid being linked with the accusations over which they are suing—just as many plaintiffs and even more defendants would prefer to avoid being linked with the allegations in many kinds of cases, allegations that may reflect badly on one or both parties. But our legal system has chosen to adopt a strong norm of public access to court records, including to the names of the parties, so that the public and the press can better supervise how the legal system operates. And this is not one of the rare cases in which an exception from this norm is warranted. The trial court thus did not abuse its discretion in ultimately deciding to deny pseudonymity. See Doe v. Cedarville Univ., 2024-Ohio-100, ¶ 18, __ N.E.3d __ (2d Dist.) ("[A] trial court's ruling regarding a party's request to proceed pseudonymously will not be overturned absent an abuse of discretion.") (cleaned up)….
