Flores v. Habitat for Humanity of Dane County, Inc.
- Laura Swain
- 1:24-cv-05344
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Flores v. Habitat for Humanity of Dane County, Inc., Judge Swain denied Flores’s request to seal the case and remove it from online search results.
Valerie Flores, whose request to restrict public access to the case was denied, and the public availability of the case docket and filings.
What happened
Flores v. Habitat for Humanity of Dane County, Inc. began when Valerie Flores filed her complaint in July 2024. The court later transferred the action to the Western District of Wisconsin, and the complaint and other filings remained available on the public court docket.
Flores asked the court to seal the case caption, the entire case, and all documents, and to remove information about the case from legal websites and search engines. She cited job-related reasons and other factors. The court concluded that her concerns had no legal relevance because the case had already been publicly available for more than nine months.
The court denied Flores’s motion. Judge Laura Taylor Swain also certified that an appeal would not be taken in good faith and denied her permission to appeal without paying filing fees.
The detailed version
- Flores v. Habitat for Humanity of Dane County, Inc. · No. 1:24-cv-05344
- Laura Swain
- May 28, 2025
Background
Valerie Flores filed this action on July 9, 2024, and the complaint was entered on the publicly available electronic docket on July 16, 2024. By an order dated July 23, 2024, and entered July 30, 2024, the court transferred the action to the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin.
Motion
On May 2, 2025, Flores moved to seal the case caption, the entire case, and all documents. She also asked the court to remove the case from legal websites and search engines, including Google and Bing. She stated that the request was based on “various job related reasons and other factors.”
Court’s reasoning
The court noted that the case and its filings had been public for more than nine months before Flores filed her motion. It concluded that any concerns arising from the filing or the information in the court filings had no legal relevance at that point because the materials had already been available on the public docket. The court also noted that it had no authority to remove information about the action that private internet platforms had already collected.
Ruling
The court denied Flores’s motion. It also certified under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(3) that any appeal from the order would not be taken in good faith and denied permission to appeal without paying the required filing fees.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.