§ 8.01-670.3.Review of order closing a proceeding or sealing a record.

Section 8.01-670.3 opens a fast track to Supreme Court review for disputes over closing a court proceeding to the public. It covers three kinds of circuit court orders: one granting or denying a motion to close a proceeding not otherwise authorized to be closed; one closing such a proceeding on the court’s own initiative, without a motion; and one affirming or reversing a general district court or juvenile and domestic relations district court order that closed such a proceeding.

Any of those orders is eligible for immediate appellate review, and any person aggrieved by one has 15 days from its entry to file a petition for review with the Supreme Court, following the procedures set out in § 8.01-626.

By pairing this section with the immunity-order provision in § 8.01-670.2, the Code gives litigants a comparable fast track for open-courts and record-sealing disputes, rather than making them wait for a final judgment to challenge how a proceeding was — or was not — closed to the public.