The government is a litigant in about a third of all federal court civil suits. The vast majority of these settle and the settlements are part of the public paper record. Anyone is "free" to go to the court and see the terms of the settlement.

But it is practically impossible for even well heeled private litigants to get access to this information -- just to hard to find. And worse yet, government attorneys themselves don't have a systematic database to help guide them in making uniform and non-capricious settlement offers.

Owen Fiss long ago was "Against Settlement" because it denied third parties of valuable judicial precedents.

But it turns out that we can have our cake and eat it too. The government could still have tons of settlements but create an electronic data base that was available to both its own lawyers and to the general public. I'm sure that Westlaw and Lexis would be happy to put this information up for search. And since all the settlement agreements are undoubtedly in Word, it would be pretty simple to just ask government lawyers to submit the word document to a centralized office to maintain the settlement database.

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