The Sixth Circuit Set a Date for Hallman v. Reeds. The Video Fight Isn’t Over.

Oral argument is scheduled for October 22, 2026. It lands seventeen days after the Hartig hearing this case keeps colliding with.

What the Notice Actually Sets in Motion

The document itself is a scheduling notice, nothing more and nothing less, and it is worth reading for what it reveals about how little institutional weight attaches to the mechanics of a case this significant. Filed August 19, 2026, over the signature of Calendar Deputy Karen S. Fultz, it sets oral argument for 9:00 a.m. Eastern on October 22, at the Potter Stewart U.S. Courthouse in Cincinnati. Counsel get fifteen minutes per side. Attorneys who intend to argue must file an Oral Argument Acknowledgment form by September 2. The three judges who will hear the case will not be public until roughly two weeks before argument, when the court posts its calendar.

Sara Elizabeth Coulter and Andrew Casey Geronimo, both of Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s Dr. Frank Stanton First Amendment Clinic, represent Hallman on appeal. William H. Horton of Giarmarco, Mullins and Horton, the firm that filed the disputed appellee brief in June, continues representing Reeds. John R. Fleming and Lawrence R. Lasusa are also copied on the notice.

The notice also flags the obvious: the panel could still decide argument is unnecessary and submit the case on the briefs alone, a possibility the court says should factor into whether counsel books refundable plane tickets. Continuances, the court notes, are “granted only in exceptional circumstances.” None of this is unusual for a federal appeal. All of it is a reminder that a case about whether the public has a right to see how courts work is itself moving through a process the public will barely notice, unless someone is watching the docket.

The Case Underneath the Docket Number

Hallman v. Reeds began in April 2025, when Dr. Samantha Hallman sued Reeds, Asadoorian, and Matis in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Hallman says she sought a recording of a probation violation hearing involving her brother in Asadoorian’s courtroom, and that the court would not provide one. She alleges Asadoorian subjected her brother to abusive conduct during that hearing, an allegation the underlying case does not resolve on the merits and that remains her characterization, not an adjudicated finding. Her lawsuit argued something broader than one hearing: that transcripts are not an adequate substitute for audio and video, and that the First Amendment guarantees the public a right to the recordings themselves, not just a paper account of what was said.

The Oakland County court where the hearing took place makes recordings available only as transcripts, on request, at cost. Hallman’s attorneys, including the ACLU of Michigan, argued that a transcript strips out tone, hesitation, and the visible conduct of the people in the room, the exact material an appellate court, or a voter, would need to evaluate whether a judge acted appropriately.

U.S. District Judge Brandy McMillion dismissed the case in late October 2025. Her order found no constitutional right under the First Amendment to access, copy, or disseminate court recordings. Hallman appealed. That appeal is Case No. 25-2166, now set for argument on October 22.

The Contradiction Clutch Justice Has Been Tracking

This is not the first time this outlet has written about Reeds and video. In March 2026, Reeds testified before the Judicial Tenure Commission in Formal Complaint No. 109, the misconduct case against 52-4 District Court Judge Kirsten Nielsen Hartig. He built his testimony on courtroom video, pulling clips from a series of Hartig’s proceedings and narrating what he saw on the recording, in real time, for the Commission’s neutral. He testified that he pulled the videos essentially at random, expecting to find problems on any given day.

Three months later, his position flipped. Reeds’ attorneys filed a corrected appellee brief in the Hallman appeal on June 10, 2026, arguing there is no First Amendment right to access or copy court recordings, and that a transcript is an adequate substitute. The brief landed one day after a master’s report in the Hartig proceeding, filed June 9, that described Reeds’ video-based testimony as though it were grounded in transcripts instead. Whether the two filings were coordinated is a question the public record cannot answer. What the record does show is that the video Reeds treated as essential evidence in one proceeding is the video his own attorneys are now telling a federal appeals court the public has no right to see.

Two Courts, Seventeen Days Apart

The calendar now makes the overlap explicit. Judge Hartig’s own JTC hearing is scheduled for October 5, 2026, at the Court of Appeals in Detroit, and the Commission has said it will livestream the proceeding. Seventeen days later, in a different building in a different state, a Sixth Circuit panel will hear arguments over whether the public ever had a right to the video that helped build the case against her in the first place.

The irony sharpens on a technical point. The Sixth Circuit livestreams audio of its own oral arguments and posts the recordings publicly afterward, a practice it adopted in 2020 and has kept. A court that treats real-time public audio access to its own proceedings as unremarkable will be asked, on October 22, to decide whether Michigan trial courts violated the Constitution by declining to do something comparable. The two proceedings will not resolve the same legal question. The Hartig hearing is about whether the misconduct case against one judge was proved. The Hallman appeal is about whether anyone besides the Commission ever gets to see evidence like it. But they share a witness, a video, and a seventeen-day gap on the calendar that makes the underlying question hard to look away from.

What Happens Between Now and October 22

Two dates matter before argument day. The first is September 2, 2026, the deadline for any attorney who intends to argue to file an Oral Argument Acknowledgment form. The second falls roughly two weeks before October 22, when the Sixth Circuit will post the names of the three judges who make up the panel.

Nothing about the schedule guarantees the case gets argued at all. The panel can still decide, after reviewing the briefs, that argument is not necessary and submit the case on the written record. If that happens, the court has said it will notify the parties immediately. For now, the date stands: October 22, 2026, fifteen minutes per side, in Cincinnati, on a question that started with one woman trying to get a recording of her brother’s hearing and has since become a test of how much of the judiciary the public is allowed to see.