I'm putting up some excerpts from my new draft article, The Law of Pseudonymous Litigation, hoping to get some feedback. This one is on how courts deal with claims that pseudonymity is needed to prevent harm to reputation or (relatedly) risk of economic retaliation. (The preceding portion of the article deals with the separate, though sometimes connected, argument that pseudonymity is necessary to protect information that is often seen as highly private, such as sexual orientation, transgender status, sexual behavior, mental illness, physical illness, and the like. Earlier portions dealt with, among other things, the costs of pseudonymity to the public, to adversaries, and to the judicial process.)
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When we get past privacy and move on to reputational harm—and the economic and professional harm that can stem from reputational harm—the dominant answer is no pseudonymity, except in one important class of cases. I'll begin by laying out a few categories of situations where the risk of reputational harm is especially serious, and then summarize the state of court decisions on the subject.
[1.] Risks of reputational harm
[a.] Defendants accused (perhaps wrongly) of serious misconduct
Many defendants could be ruined simply by being publicly accused of certain offenses (rape, sexual harassment, embezzlement, fraud, malpractice, and the like)—or can be materially harmed even by being sued for more minor matters, such as in landlords' unlawful detainer actions against...
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