ABSTRACT
For decades, scholars debated the merits between resolving disputes by public adjudications or private settlements. This tension is particularly relevant in misconduct settlements, where wrongdoers can hide behind the confidentiality available in a private settlement. A paradigmatic example of this was the #MeToo movement and the revelation of serial sexual predators sheltered by secret settlements. Using Multi-Party Computation, a cryptographic technique that enables parties to provide private data for computation without giving up confidentiality, we contribute a fully-interwoven statutory-technological system that implements secure reporting of wrongful misconduct settlements, in order to provide oversight statistics to policymakers and to unmask repeatedly-settling parties for investigation. By providing a unique policy option that balances privacy with oversight, our proposal lessens the need to restrict settlement confidentiality, thereby protecting the autonomy of the parties to settle privately, if they so choose. More broadly, our proposal addresses the oversight complaints against settlements by scholars, and advances the discourse on the appropriate roles of adjudication and settlements in resolving disputes.
Carrel, Alyson, Murmurs of the Silenced: Secure Reporting of Misconduct Settlements (April 15, 2025) in Symposium on Computer Science and Law (CSLAW ’25), March 25–27, 2025, München, Germany; ACM, New York, NY, USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3709025.3712207; Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No 25-16.
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