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Most opinions and orders are published for free on various government sites. PACER is useful for seeing submissions from parties or the court that occur in pen
by pnw_hazor 6y ago
Most opinions and orders are published for free on various government sites.
PACER is useful for seeing submissions from parties or the court that occur in pending cases.
Usually this stuff is of little interest or use to normal people.
- chaps 6y agoHeh. I'm not talking about opinions, I'm talking about case outcomes, involved parties, lawyers, judge info, terminated parties, dates, docket info, context, complaints. And furthermore, I'm not talking about individual cases. The interest for "normal" people largely comes from the aggregate of PACER records, with analysis done on top of that. In other words - because we can't get aggregate records of court information, we can't run analysis that would be interesting or useful for understanding what's happening. Surely you can see how this data could inform the US in understanding how the law is applied throughout. If not, I'll gladly type up a list of 50 kinds of analysis that would be interesting to normal people. The people who would run this analysis are technical journalists with backgrounds in court data. An example of a project that uses PACER information whose bills are in the thousands because of the high PACER costs: https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-misconduct/ https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-miscondu... This is not feasible in a time where freelance journalists have to do preliminary research before even writing a pitch.