Superior Court of California
County of Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California

MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

THE HONORABLE RONALD M. SOHIGIAN, PRESIDING

Proceedings recorded by electronic sound recording, transcript produced by transcription service.

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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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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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