Court case records and proceedings are presumptively public, but occasionally there are compelling reasons for keeping all or parts of them confidential, sometimes permanently but often only temporarily.

An analysis of all cases filed in federal district courts, bankruptcy courts, and courts of appeals in 2006 revealed that 0.2% of civil cases, 1.6% of criminal cases, 16% of magistrate judge cases, 34% of miscellaneous cases, and 0.1% of appeals were sealed approximately two years after filing.

When a United States senator asked the federal judiciary to look into sealed settlement agreements, the Civil Rules Advisory Committee asked the Federal Judicial Center to undertake a research effort to discover how often settlement agreements are sealed in federal court and under what circumstan