Being invisible would be cool.  We all know that.  You could do things that you would otherwise be afraid or unable to do.  And no one would see you do it.  You’re hidden from criticism, retaliation and embarrassment.  It’s such an alluring idea that it has shown up in literature for thousands of years.  It’s in The Republic.  There’s H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man.  The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter had it.  Wonder Woman had an awesome invisible plane, though we never quite understood the advantage of an invisible plane while everything inside it, including the pilot, was visible.  Maybe it looks like the pilot can fly, which is obviously very cool. 

A theme running through much of the literature, however, is that invisibility can corrupt.  In The Lord of the Rings, putting on the ring makes you invisible but also rots your soul and makes you visible to the evil that is coming for you.  In The Republic, a man with an invisibility ring is used as support for the argument that a person who can do injustice without ramifications will do it.

But the purpose of the Courts is to do justice.  To promote this goal, the public has a strong interest in the courts being an open forum with parties identified by name.  The courts don’t see invisibility as cool.  They see it as an invitation to corruption.  So we see in our everyday practice of law real names on both sides of the “v.”  Now, sometimes there’s a John or a Jane Doe, but we know that those are there as placeholders until the actual party is identified and then named.

This leads us to the recent decision in Doe v. Merck & Co., No. 11-cv-02680-RBJ-KLM (D. Colo. Feb. 17, 2012), a products liability action in which the plaintiff claimed that the drug Propecia, used to treat baldness, caused him significant sexual problems.  Given the “highly sensitive, intimate and personal nature” of the alleged side effects, the plaintiff brought a motion seeking to proceed anonymously.  Slip op. at 3.

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