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issue before this Court.

THE COURT: Well, pardon me, that moves into the

next point that he makes. He says, look, to be sure, the

litigants cite cases which have some kind of potential

pertinence to this case. They talk about public policy, they

talk about confidentiality. But in making that determination

as a practical matter, deciding rather than just talking, what

you have to do, his argument is, is weigh the weight of the

inhibition on communication.

When the inhibition on communication restricts

somebody from communication about trade secrets you have one

kind of a situation. There the proprietor of the trade secret

has presumptively a very, very substantial right in preserving

confidentiality. This after all is information which is

almost in the nature of property; it's something which

presumptively is lawfully acquired; it is something that

presumptively furthers a very significant interest in our

society; the interest in conducting business in a certain way;

it's interest which -- it's information which was turned over

to the other person under conditions of secrecy; it's

information which is guarded and protected in a certain way,

kept confidential, and so forth.

So that when somebody says, look, you can restrict

somebody from disclosing trade secrets, Greene's point is

yeah, I'll go along with that, that's an easy case. But he

says in this case what you have is something different. Here

you have at best for your client warring constitutional

rights. And as Greene sees it, a constitutional right on the

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107

part of Armstrong counterbalanced by no right of that gravity

on the part of your client, the plaintiff.

Moreover, he says the information that is being

suppressed in the trade secret case is information which the

trade secret proprietor owns, at least as the law

fictionalizes the construct. The information that's being

suppressed in this case, however, is information about

extremely blame-worthy behavior of the plaintiff which nobody

owns; it is information having to do with the behavior of a

high degree of offensiveness and behavior which is meritorious

in the extreme.

It involves abusing people who are weak. It

involves taking advantage of people who for one reason or

another get themselves enmeshed in this extremist view in a

way that makes them unable to resist it apparently. It

involves using techniques of coercion. His argument is, when

you now begin to balance so as to make a determination about

what has to go into the calculus that gives rise to a public

policy assessment, you've got to balance that.

MR. WILSON: Well Your Honor, first of all I didn't

say that the employment case was on all fours with this case.

Cases that we rely on that are close to this case are the ones

we've already discussed.

Second of all, there is a public policy at work

here. And that policy is settlement agreements. And Mr.

Heller's declaration is very clear about why this case was

settled the way it was. Mr. Armstrong was running around

giving declarations in his own litigation, previous litigation

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