In most American states, if you sit in the back of a criminal courtroom you can watch someone’s life be decided in public. If you walk down the hall to family court, the door is often closed, the docket is sealed, and the only people allowed to know what happened are the parties, their lawyers, and the judge. The argument for that secrecy is privacy. The cost of it is accountability — and the system has been failing in private for decades.
What closed courts hide
Family courts handle divorce, custody, child support, domestic violence protection orders, and termination of parental rights. They issue rulings that determine where a child lives and whether a parent retains the legal right to see them. They’re also the courts most likely to involve allegations of abuse, mental illness, and substance use — exactly the kinds of allegations that benefit from being tested in front of witnesses.
Closed proceedings hide judges who consistently rule against abuse survivors, court-appointed evaluators with documented bias, and lawyers who run scams on uninformed pro se litigants. Investigative reporting that has managed to penetrate sealed records — the Houston Chronicle’s series on Texas family courts, ProPublica’s reporting on guardian ad litem fees — has consistently found patterns that wouldn’t survive sustained public scrutiny.
The privacy argument is real but often pretextual
Defenders of closed courts argue that exposing family disputes harms children. That’s a legitimate concern, and any open-courts proposal has to address it. But the same logic could close juvenile criminal courts and child welfare hearings, and most states have moved toward more transparency in those settings, not less. The available models — pseudonymized records, redaction of children’s names, presumptive openness with case-by-case sealing for genuine privacy needs — exist and work.
The privacy argument is also frequently invoked by the parties most embarrassed by what’s happening: high-conflict litigants, abusers seeking to suppress accusations, and occasionally judges and lawyers who don’t want their conduct examined. Privacy that protects children is defensible. Privacy that protects bad actors is harder to justify.
What sunlight has produced where it’s been tried
A handful of states have experimented with greater family court access. Connecticut allowed media observation for a period and produced a wave of investigative coverage that documented systemic failures in custody evaluations. Minnesota’s records reforms made it possible to study judicial decision patterns and revealed wide disparities between judges within the same county. Neither state’s children appear to have been harmed by the change.
The pattern across these experiments is consistent: when family court records become accessible, journalists and academics find serious problems, advocacy groups organize around reform, and the institutions that resisted disclosure end up improving. The transparency itself does much of the work.
The takeaway
The closed family court model defends itself with the language of protecting children, but the protection often runs in the other direction — protecting a system that hasn’t earned the public’s trust. Open courts wouldn’t fix every problem, and they’d create new ones. They would also make the existing problems impossible to ignore, which is exactly the point.
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