Legal Definitions - expurgation

Expurgation refers to the act or process of carefully reviewing and removing specific parts of a text, document, or record that are considered objectionable, sensitive, confidential, or inappropriate for a particular context or audience. This removal is often done to protect privacy, comply with legal requirements, or make the material suitable for public release.

Here are some examples to illustrate this concept:

• Imagine a government agency preparing to release a detailed report on a public health crisis. Before making it available to the public, the agency might perform an expurgation to remove personally identifiable information of patients, proprietary data from pharmaceutical companies, or details that could compromise national security.

  This illustrates expurgation because specific, sensitive information is deliberately removed from the report to protect individual privacy and national interests before its public dissemination.

• During a lawsuit, a company is required to provide thousands of internal emails and documents to the opposing legal team. Before handing them over, the company's lawyers might engage in expurgation, redacting portions of emails that contain legally privileged attorney-client communications or highly confidential trade secrets, provided such redactions are legally permissible under court rules.

  Here, expurgation involves the removal of legally protected or proprietary information from documents to be disclosed in litigation, ensuring that only relevant and non-privileged material is shared.

• A university archive is preparing to publish a collection of letters written by a prominent historical figure. To respect the privacy of living descendants and avoid revealing deeply personal or potentially embarrassing details not relevant to the historical context, the archivists might perform an expurgation, omitting certain names or specific private anecdotes from the published version.

  This demonstrates expurgation as the selective removal of sensitive personal details from historical documents to balance public access with privacy considerations for individuals connected to the historical record.