Crescat Sententia noticed the following observation from 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner‘s opinion on the disclosure of Northwestern Memorial Hospital abortion records. Got to remember this one next time I’m pursuing a motion to quash discovery:

We’re still at a loss to understand what [the government] hopes to gain from such discovery. (We begged the government’s lawyer to be concrete.) Of course, not having seen the records, the government labors under a disadvantage, although it has surely seen other medical records. And of course, pretrial discovery is a fishing expedition and one can’t know what one has caught until one fishes. But Fed. R. Civ. P. 45(c) allows the fish to object, and when they do so, the fisherman has to come up with more than the government has been able to do in this case despite the excellence of its lawyers.