Judge Releases Parts of Sidebar Transcripts

BY MICHELLE N. AMPONSAH AND EMMA H. HAIDAR CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

As Harvard’s admissions lawsuit unfolds at the Supreme Court, Massachusetts District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs unsealed parts of 2018 Harvard admissions courtroom transcripts of private conversations between the judge and the lawyers — known as sidebars — last month.

Harvard law professor Jeannie C. Suk Gersen filed a request to unseal on Nov. 11, arguing that the high-profile case required greater transparency. Several days after Gersen, The New York Times and the New Yorker — for which Gersen is a contributing writer — also filed in support of unsealing the sidebars.

“When I went to go look at the transcripts back from 2018 to try to make sure I had a complete record of what happened at trial, I discovered that all of the side - bars were sealed, and that certainly is not normal,” Gersen said in an interview with The Crimson. “In fact, I can hardly think of other civil cases where a blanket sealing of every single sidebar of a trial would have occurred.”

Some transcript excerpts from the sixth, seventh, and tenth days of the threeweek trial between Harvard and anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions, which alleges that the College discriminates against Asian American applicants, remain sealed.

Ten days after the Dec. 19 order to unseal, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an appeal, stating that the “undefined category” of applicant information is not “sensitive enough to overcome the presumption of access.” On Jan. 11, the New Yorker filed another letter of appeal.

Burroughs said in her decision that the Court weighed the “sensitivity of the

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