The Right to Be Forgotten in Public Archives: Should Legal Databases Face Defamation Liability?

Somewhere in a legal database sits a case that mattered enormously to two people once, and to almost no one since. This article asks a narrow but pressing question: when a database keeps a niche, decades-old, purely private judgment permanently searchable by name, should it bear any legal responsibility for the harm that permanence causes? The inquiry sits at the collision of two principles rarely forced to confront each other directly; the doctrine of open courts, traced here through Scott v Scott, which treats publicity as a structural check on power rather than a courtesy, and the right to be forgotten, born out of the CJEU’s ruling in Google Spain and developed since through GDPR’s storage-limitation principle and a still-unsettled thread of Indian High Court jurisprudence following Puttaswamy. The article argues that legal databases occupy a distinct position in this debate, different from search engines or news archives, because their claim to public-interest protection is strong for precedent-setting judgments but considerably weaker for cases involving only private parties with no lasting legal value. After weighing the case for liability against the countervailing risks to research, archival integrity, and free expression, the article proposes a graduated response rather than a binary rule, consisting of upstream redaction, de-indexing without deletion, time-based sunset provisions, and tiered liability distinguishing accurate reproduction from added commentary. It does not resolve the underlying tension, but argues the law’s response should match the remedy to how much public interest has genuinely survived time.