Research from the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession gets a close look in the most recent New York Times Docket newsletter.

The study asks: If court records are presumptively public, why are so many federal civil filings sealed? The answer points to a system in which sealing ...requests are often uncontested, leaving judges as the public’s principal safeguard.

As study co-author Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom told the NYT’s Adam Liptak, there are legitimate reasons for secrecy and real trade-offs. But judges need to do more than simply rubber-stamp requests to seal materials that shape their decisions.

Read more in the NYT (subscription may be required): https://brnw.ch/21x5hM3

Read the Rhode Center’s policy brief: https://brnw.ch/21x5hM4

Stanford Law School research is at the center of a new Atlantic article examining what happens to political spending after fatal school shootings.

The study finds that pro-gun PACs sharply increase contributions to favored House candidates in competitive districts after children are killed... in school shootings. Eric Baldwin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford Law School, led the study, along with co-authors John J. Donohue III, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, and Takuma Iwasaki, a Stanford Law JSD candidate.

“The data shows that the gun lobby saves its political firepower for the moments when public grief is greatest and lawmakers are under the most pressure to act,” Baldwin tells The Atlantic.

“School Shootings and the Strategic Contributions of Gun Policy PACs in U.S. House Elections” was published earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read it here: https://brnw.ch/21x5g5h

Read more in The Atlantic (subscription may be required): https://brnw.ch/21x5g5i

“The more daylight there is, the more trouble for Meta.”

In the closely watched federal trial now underway in Oakland, Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom says a key question is what the proceedings bring to light about any gap between Meta’s internal understanding of the risks to young ...users and what it told the public.

The case was brought by state attorneys general and centers on allegations that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to keep young people compulsively engaged, misled the public about the risks, and collected data from children under 13 in violation of federal law.

In a new Q&A, Engstrom puts the case in context and explains why its outcome could matter well beyond this courtroom, with thousands of related lawsuits waiting in the wings. Read more:

What’s at Stake in the Meta Trial | Stanford Law School

(Originally published by Stanford Report on August 25, 2026.) Four states kicked off a closely-watched trial against Meta last week, alleging that the

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