Trade secret laws are increasingly functioning as a way to shield a wide swath of information from the public, Sonia Katyal writes in a recent Georgetown Law Journal article. She and co-author Charles Tait Graves argue that this new approach is a sea change that in many cases extends protections meant to safeguard intellectual property to nearly all information about a company, product, or even a government loan, in cases running the gamut from employment law to environmental hazards. “The overbreadth of secrecy and confidentiality claims to conceal matters of public concern or other information that should ordinarily be publicly available,” they write, poses a substantial threat to an informed democracy. Katyal and Graves also propose a broad and more narrow path to reform.