## Facts

- Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. and an affiliated trust company alleged that WikiLeaks published confidential bank records concerning Cayman Islands trusts and private client accounts.
- The bank asserted the records were unlawfully obtained and included allegedly forged materials, and claimed the publication harmed confidentiality and privacy interests.
- The bank sued WikiLeaks-related defendants and Dynadot, a domain-name registrar for wikileaks.org, and sought emergency injunctive relief.
- The court issued an ex parte TRO barring defendants and others with notice from publishing or linking to the disputed documents.
- By stipulation involving Dynadot, the TRO’s implementation effectively disabled the wikileaks.org domain name by locking and altering DNS-related settings, though mirror sites remained available.
- After the TRO, third parties, including civil-liberties and media organizations, submitted amicus materials arguing the relief operated as an unconstitutional prior restraint.
- The court held a hearing on whether to convert the TRO into a preliminary injunction.

## Issues

1. Whether the TRO and requested preliminary injunction, including disabling access to an entire domain, constituted an impermissible prior restraint under the First Amendment.
2. Whether plaintiffs satisfied preliminary-injunction requirements, including likelihood of success, irreparable harm, balance of hardships, and consistency with the public interest.
3. Whether the breadth of relief directed at a registrar and “all others who receive notice” was proper and narrowly tailored given the alleged harms.

## Decision

- The court dissolved the TRO and declined to issue a preliminary injunction.
- The court concluded the relief functioned as a prior restraint and carried a heavy presumption against validity.
- The court found the domain-level restrictions overbroad because they suppressed substantial lawful speech beyond the challenged materials.
- The court noted the injunction was largely ineffective because the documents were available through mirrors and other republication, undermining claims that disabling a single domain would prevent harm.
- The court weighed the public interest and hardships and determined continued suppression of access to the site was not justified on the record presented.

## Legal Principles

- Prior restraints on speech are strongly disfavored and require an extraordinary justification before a court may restrain publication or broadly block access to speech.
- Injunctive relief restricting expression must be narrowly tailored to address specific unlawful conduct; disabling an entire domain to reach disputed content risks unconstitutional overbreadth.
- Preliminary injunctions require a persuasive showing on likelihood of success, irreparable harm, balance of hardships, and alignment with the public interest; the showing is especially demanding when the remedy restrains speech.
- When information has already entered public circulation through widespread republication, attempts to suppress it through broad injunctions may be ineffective and weaken claims of preventable irreparable harm.

## Conclusion

The court dissolved an ex parte TRO and refused to impose a preliminary injunction that effectively shut down wikileaks.org, reasoning that the requested relief operated as an overbroad prior restraint, was unlikely to prevent the alleged harms given widespread republication, and was inconsistent with the strong First Amendment presumption against suppressing access to published information.


Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. v. WikiLeaks, 535 F. Supp. 2d 980 (N.D. Cal. 2008)