Maggie Moulton sued her former long-term partner, William Goodell, alleging that he gave her genital herpes without disclosing his infection, and sought more than a decade of his medical records and lab reports in discovery. The trial court refused to compel production based on Goodell’s right to privacy under the Georgia Constitution, and the Court of Appeals vacated that ruling, reasoning that the motion and hearing gave Goodell enough due process. The Supreme Court of Georgia first confirmed that, under Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. and later medical-records precedent, the records fall within the Georgia constitutional right to privacy, rejecting any suggestion that Pavesich should be reconsidered. The Court held that whether that right bars civil discovery is governed not by strict scrutiny but by the nuanced, case-by-case balancing Pavesich describes, weighing the privacy interest against the requesting party’s litigation need, any state interest, and the public’s interest in open courts. It reasoned that strict scrutiny is a later federal invention that would threaten to swallow civil discovery, and that earlier Georgia privacy cases using its language never truly applied it. Neither lower court performed that balancing: the trial court considered only Goodell’s interests, and the Court of Appeals wrongly equated notice and a hearing with protection of a substantive right. The Court added that a HIPAA-style qualified protective order may inform the balance but cannot by itself resolve it, and it vacated and remanded for the trial court to apply the standard, leaving waiver to the lower courts.