Will Phred's Packet O' Pharmacia Secret-Case Materials Soon Be "Sunshine Liberated"?

At the moment, the early-2000s era federal class-action securities litigation -- based on the alleged conduct of CEO Hassan (and his then-deputy, Carrie Smith Cox), while both were employed as executive officers of Pharmacia -- is stayed, or "on-hold", pending a decision in an unrelated United States Supreme Court case (involving, as irony would have it, Merck -- on procedural matters that could well have an impact on procedural matters in this Pharmacia case). Got all that? Good.

Now, while they were waiting (image of Celebrex^®, at right -- the drug involved in the allegedly-incomplete prior-disclosures by Pharmacia), the Pharmacia case plaintiffs' lawyers filed papers asking the very-able New Jersey federal District Court Judge Anne E. Thompson to unseal portions of the docket that were previously sealed in this litigation. Today, she held an "in camera", or a private, inside-chambers, not in open court, hearing on that motion -- and elected to reserve judgment on it.

The text of her order appears below, but it is significant that Judge Thompson did not simply reject the motion to unseal, outright. One could read it as a hint, that if the unrelated Supreme Court case resolves itself in a manner which suggests the Pharmacia litigation may continue to proceed down its present track, toward a trial on the merits, she might be inclined to unseal those records. I strongly suspect those Hassan-Cox Pharmacia-era records might reverberate with a "pre-echo" of the (alleged) Schering-Plough conduct:

. . . .Minute Entry for proceedings held before Judge Anne E. Thompson:

In Camera Hearing held on September 23, 2009 re: Plaintiffs' motion to vacate the sealing order.

DECISION RESERVED. . . .

Fascinating.

LATER: I would be remiss, here, if I did not note in passing that outgoing Schering-Plough "CEO-For-Now" Fred Hassan just told reporters stringing for the Wall Street Journal that he might join a "very small health care company," post-merger, one perhaps only on the verge of generating positive cash-flow. [Insert quip here, about needing to deploy his own cash-flow to defend some 150 pieces of pending litigation.]