United States Seventh Circuit

An independent journalist's petition for permission to intervene to challenge a protective order that prohibited public disclosure of confidential voluminous materials relating to citizen complaints against officers after a plaintiff's settlement against the city of Chicago and several members of its police department, an order simultaneously granting the journalist's request to intervene and lifting the order in its entirety is vacated because the petition to intervene should have been dismissed for lack of standing where: 1) the controversy originally supporting the court's jurisdiction no longer existed at the time the court acted on the petition; 2) the parties had settled; 3) the case was dismissed with prejudice; and 4) neither plaintiff nor the city asked the court to revisit and modify the terms of the protective order postjudgment. Furthermore, the district court lacked any alternative jurisdictional basis to revisit and revoke the protective order sua sponte as there is no presumption of public access emanating from Rule 26(c)'s good cause requirement for discovery that is not part of the court file.

Appellate Information

• Argued 06/03/2008
• Decided 11/10/2009
• Published 11/10/2009

Judges

• SYKES, Circuit Judge., Before KANNE, SYKES, and TINDER, Circuit Judges.

Court

• United States Seventh Circuit

Counsel

• For Appellant:
  
• Craig B. Futterman, Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.


• For Appellees:
  
• Myriam Z. Kasper (argued), Nadine J. Wichern, Office of the Corporation Counsel, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellants., Cara A. Hendrickson (argued), Matthew J. Piers, Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Chicago, IL, for Intervening Appellees., Jonathan I. Loevy (argued), Loevy & Loevy, Chicago, IL, for Intervenor-Appellee.