This is a narrow and problematic view. While it's true that non-opinion parts of dockets aren't "the law" in the sense of issuing precedent that courts will be

This is a narrow and problematic view. While it's true that non-opinion parts of dockets aren't "the law" in the sense of issuing precedent that courts will be expected to follow in other cases, it's also true that these other parts of dockets contribute to important kinds of legal knowledge that we ought to care about in a democracy governed by law. They include, for example, information about the actions of immensely powerful corporations and individuals. The fact that court dockets are public records allows us to know who has sued Donald Trump, or Google. They also provide information about the actions of the government, including courts, police, prosecutors, again in cases of extreme public concern. Sorry to get on my high horse, but I literally wrote a book about the notion of the rule of law[1] --- and one of the key ideas of the rule of law is that the people need to have access to information about what the powerful do in order to collectively hold them accountable for their behavior. For comparison: there's a Federal Register and a Code of Federal Regulations. The latter just contains the stuff that would be "the law" in rayiner's sense---the generally applicable results of rulemaking. The former also contains public notices, proposed rules, executive orders, and other executive branch actions. A world in which we had access to the CFR but not the Federal Register would be worse, from the standpoint of the freedom of law, than a world in which we have access to both (thankfully, the actual world). [1] http://rulelaw.net http://rulelaw.net