Secrecy in Settlements - Who Wants To Know? (and WHY?)

I recently saw an interesting example of human behaviour and confidential lawsuit settlements, something I’ve been interested in and have recently written about (which caused some interesting reactions at Prawfsfest in T-town last year). Recently, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police settled a lawsuit with the mother of a Polish man who was tasered and died in the Vancouver airport last year. The RCMP apologized and settled for an undisclosed sum. See the CBC article here.

The interesting part about the article are the comments by web commenters – a surprising number of them ‘demand’ that the dollar figure amount of the settlement be disclosed to the public. The most common reason cited for such disclosure is “the public’s right to know what’s going on with the public’s money.”

Now, as many of you on here know, I don’t really buy this argument, for a host of reasons (about which you can read in the upcoming “Keeping Settlements Secret,” (2010) FSU L. Rev. (forthcoming)). But what I’m curious to know is why the visceral reaction by the public about the amount? 

Do they REALLY want to know for reasons of civic accountability (i.e. do they think something is wrong with the settlement or with government lawyers)? Do they REALLY want to know for reasons of public transparency (do they think the public justice system requires transparency for some transcendental reason that they just choose not to articulate on a website blog)? Or do they just plain out want to know because they’re curious about what kind of money this grieving mother got so they can complain about it at the watercooler? Those are three very different reasons for me, and the third one is not one on which I’d base a decision on revealing secrecy.

For what it’s worth, I have difficulty understanding how, in some cases, the need/want of the public to ‘know’ the amount does more good than harm for the litigants. Is ‘the public” in a good position to evaluate a settlement? How does ‘the public’ evaluate settlements? Talk about information asymmetry! And then, what do they do with the information? What’s the ‘value?’ Thankfully, the large proportion of the ‘public’ are not lawyers and thus may not know what an appropriate range of a settlement is. They are not privy to the facts that led to it. Yet there sure is the desire to ‘want to know.’

Or, do people only want to know because they “can’t?” If it was public, would they ever really peer into a court file? What’s the redeeming value for the news consuming public?

There are a multitude of public spending situations about which the ‘public’ has no ability to ask ‘how much.’ That’s why we have some governmental discretion. But here, should the grieving mother be subject to public scrutiny about the ‘value’ of her settlement? If deemed ‘too high’ by the public, she’ll be ridiculed about how the government spent ‘the public’s’ money. Or make some conjecture (perhaps untrue) about the conduct of the police defendants in question. If deemed ‘too low’ by the public, she’ll be ridiculed about how little she received for such a tragedy. It’s lose, lose. So where’s the value?

In short, in private law, civil litigation settlements where parties themselves drive the litigation and determine when and how to settle, just because the dollars come from public coffers, does the public have a right ‘to know’ the amount even if it’s perhaps not helpful information but harmful to the parties if it gets out?