Today is Juneteenth, a celebration and commemoration of the announcement that the Black slaves of Texas were finally freed in 1865. That announcement came more than two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the Confederate defeat in the Civil War.

If you’re a party to litigation, you can generally expect that your name and the facts of your case will be made public. Cases have names like Smith v. Jones as opposed to, say, Citizen 984 vs. Citizen 837, with the expectation that the contents of court filings and hearings are part of the public […]