On Sunday, WikiLeaks made available thousands of secret documents about the war in Afghanistan. While the government condemned the act, it did not go to court to try to stop it. Why not? Perhaps because it had tried that almost forty years ago with the Pentagon Papers. Restraining publication of truthful information—prior restraint, as it is known—comes “bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity,” a presumption not met by the argument that the publication of a classified study of the government’s policies in Vietnam would hinder national security.

But two days earlier, Judge Judith Bartnoff of the D.C. Superior Court apparently decided that different standards apply to pomegranate juice than to national security. On Friday, July 23rd, Judge Bartnoff ruled that the identity of a government agency investigating PomWonderful, the company created by the billionaire marketing genius Lynda Resnick, whom Amanda Fortini wrote about for The New Yorker in 2008, was so secret that she ordered the National Law Journal not to print it—even though the identity of the agency had been published in court records that were freely available weeks ago. But the judge said that those documents should have been sealed and found that the court’s interest in maintaining the “integrity” of its docket overrode the First Amendment concern.

The background to this dispute is maddeningly trivial. PomWonderful, which sells a pomegranate drink with purported health benefits, hired the law firm Hogan and Hartson to represent it in the investigation by the regulatory agency. Hogan racked up bills of over six hundred thousand dollars and PomWonderful refused to pay, claiming the fees were exorbitant and the service subpar. They replaced Hogan with an attorney from Covington & Burling, John Graubert, who formerly worked at the F.T.C. (Is the agency in question the F.T.C.?) In February, Hogan filed suit to recover its fees. Pom responded, and also sought to seal many of the documents involved in the lawsuit. Apparently, the investigation was described in the court papers, and the Law Journal obtained the publicly available documents for an article about the fee dispute. The F.D.A. issued a warning letter to PomWonderful in February saying that their Web sites contained “serious violations of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act” because the drink was being marketed as a drug. (Is the agency in question the F.D.A.?)

On Friday, after a two-hour argument, Judge Bartnoff decided to take on the Constitution over a fee dispute concerning what is quite possibly a consumer-protection investigation, putting the secrecy of a private business above the public’s right to know. “If I am throwing 80 years of First Amendment jurisprudence on its head, so be it,” Bartnoff said at the hearing, according to Legal Times. “None of that First Amendment jurisprudence, to my knowledge, is dealing with this issue—the integrity of the functioning of the court system.”

Judge Bartnoff may have made her decision after careful consideration. But it has long been established by the Supreme Court that a prior restraint is the last resort—and only to be used in times of great national significance. Moreover, the Court has previously held that the publication of information contained in court files legally obtained cannot be punished.

There’s a special irony to this instance of prior restraint because Resnick was implicated in the Pentagon Papers case. Her then boyfriend, Anthony Russo, convinced her to allow him and Daniel Ellsberg to copy the Pentagon Papers on the copier of the ad agency that she ran. The Washington Post has reported that Resnick was an unindicted co-conspirator in the criminal case against Russo and Ellsberg. (The charges were later dismissed.) “I knew conceptually what I was copying but I didn’t read it,” she told Fortini in 2008.