IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION
Issue
In *In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation*, the First Amendment Coalition and Free Law Project argue that a proposed court order cannot lawfully compel members of the general public—including non-party archival organizations—to delete and destroy copies of a court document that was briefly available on the public docket before being sealed. The question is non-obvious because it sits at the intersection of a district court's undisputed power to seal its own records and the independent constitutional and statutory rights of third parties who lawfully obtained those records during the window of public access.
What Happened
At the pretrial stage of this major MDL, the parties submitted a joint stipulated proposed order (ECF No. 3048) that would, among other things, require deletion and destruction of copies of ECF No. 3009-1—a document briefly accessible on PACER before being sealed. Non-parties First Amendment Coalition and Free Law Project, represented by Professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Megan Gray, filed this motion for leave to submit an amicus brief opposing the delete-and-destroy provision. The proposed amicus brief advances three independent arguments against the order as applied to members of the public who lawfully obtained the document: that Rule 65 does not permit injunctive relief binding non-parties outside the narrow categories of agents and active participants; that ordering deletion without notice or a hearing violates basic due process guarantees; and that compelling removal of lawfully obtained public court records constitutes a prior restraint on speech in violation of the First Amendment. Free Law Project separately argues that, as an interactive computer service hosting user-uploaded documents through the RECAP plugin, it is shielded from compelled removal by 47 U.S.C. § 230. The brief seeks denial of the deletion provision solely as applied to non-parties who accessed the document while it was publicly available.
Why It Matters
This filing presses a structural question about the outer limits of judicial power that has rarely been litigated directly: once a court document becomes publicly accessible—even briefly—can a federal court order ordinary people and legal-records archives to delete it? The answer has immediate stakes for the social media MDL, where internal corporate documents that appeared on PACER may be effectively irrecoverable from public archives, but the implications extend to every MDL and high-profile federal case where inadvertent public filing occurs. The convergence of prior restraint doctrine and Section 230 in a court-records context is novel, and if accepted even in part, could meaningfully constrain district courts' equitable reach over third-party hosts like CourtListener and analogous legal transparency infrastructure. Three open questions flagged here—whether inherent docket-management power extends to ordering destruction of records held by non-parties, whether Section 230 bars affirmative injunctive relief compelling content removal, and how Rule 65's "active concert" prong applies to systematic PACER-mirroring services—are likely to recur as litigation-document archives become more organized and publicly accessible.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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