Red Alert! Subscribers, Do Not Open Appendices in December 9th Post. Motion was Denied in Part, According to Verbal Instruction from SCOTUS Staff

I filed a motion to seal and then unseal documents in the Portfolio Recovery Associates case that is at the United States Supreme Court on Writ of Certiorari.

The motion was docketed only as a motion to seal.

The motion was granted.

The motion was not available on the SCOTUS website. Here it is.

I called the clerk to confirm that “motion granted” referred only to the motion here, not my petition for writ of certiorari. The next day a woman called. I was cooking lunch and did not write down what she said. My memory is that the court decided to seal the documents in the Supreme Court, they understood that I was asking to unseal, and they did not grant that part of the motion. She did not know why, she said, that they did not say “denied in part” or mention the request to unseal. She agreed to send me a letter putting this in writing, which I have not received yet.

I hope they intend to address the unsealing issue later. For now, according to the woman who called me from the court’s phone, the appendices attached to the December 9, 2024 post you received by email are still sealed. You should treat them as such. Thank you.

UPDATE: The email notification of my post was not showing up on my account earlier today. Since no emails were coming in, I checked my settings and realized I had the wrong tab open. I checked my email of the post with the sealed appendices and the appendices opened. A copy I forwarded to my secondary email also allowed me to open the appendices.

There is still nothing in writing that says my motion was denied in part. It is not contemptuous of me to have interpreted “motion granted” to mean “motion granted in full”. Somehow, I know I will be thrown in the Gulag for my insubordination though. How sad a world in which we live.