Beginning In 2002, with almost no debate, courts throughout the United States began to adopt electronic filing systems, and blithely jettisoned a system of paper record keeping dating from the 13 th Century in England. Under the earlier paper system, a set of legal rules was developed under which court records were kept public in order to maintain the accountability of the legal system. However, given the difficulty of accessing paper records, most legal files remained “practically obscure,” thus still protecting the privacy of litigants. This balance between accountability and privacy has been dramatically changed by the shift to electronic court records, which has subjected a vast treasure trove of sensitive personal and commercial information to uses for which it was never intended – from wholesale extraction by commercial data-miners to individualized mischief by identity thieves. What is the proper balance between accountability and privacy in an age of electronic judicial information?