5 ms·
Court Records Should Be Free
- panny 4mo ago>The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- Grazester 4mo agoIsn't the replacement for CM/ECF, ACMS?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- musicale 4mo agoFree to humans possibly.
- musicale 4mo agoIs that you Gemini?
- stainablesteel 4mo agothere was a website for this https://courtwatch.us/ https://courtwatch.us/
- cdolan 4mo agocourtlistener and the Recap program fill a vital niche at the moment. Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download. Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!
- tptacek 4mo agoFor the most part, RECAP just eliminates inconvenience. For matters of widespread interest, RECAP saves thousands of people from having to make PACER accounts. But the stuff that ends up on RECAP, for obvious reasons, tends to be the small minority of cases that the public is interested in, and for the most part that content is practically (sometimes literally) free. I think RECAP rules a lot and I have the plugins enabled in the browser session I use to read PACER. I'm just saying, it's not really a liberation of all of PACER.
- qingcharles 4mo agoAgree -- RECAP is 100x easier to use than the official PACER. Plus RECAP is Google/LLM indexed, whereas PACER being paywalled means nothing is indexed, and their search is also annoying. In fact the whole PACER site has that real 1993 "I wrote this in perl with cgi-bin" feel.
- Scoundreller 4mo agoSometimes you hit the sweet spot where you’re using up your $30 “free” credit and letting someone else use theirs for the next batch of documents. I don’t find it hard to find stuff that others haven’t submitted to RECAP.
- awinter-py 4mo ago[dead]
- qingcharles 4mo agoI've been burning up every cent of my free $30/month PACER credit liberating important filings into RECAP for the last five years. The last year and a half of this administration has made this task very hard to keep up with as there are so many federal lawsuits and criminal cases. I just screwed up and accidentally went over my free limit so now I owe a real pound of flesh to the courts. Maybe my debt will be wiped out when the new Act is effective?
- Scoundreller 4mo ago
- anon373839 4mo agoI actually approve of the something closer to the status quo here. Court filings contain a lot of sensitive information about the litigants. It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.
- monooso 4mo agoIsn't that basically the same as saying court filings should be available, but not to poor people?
- anon373839 4mo agoNo. Indigent users can already request fee exemptions, and that can be expanded. Access can be provided at courthouses and public libraries. (I don’t know if that is already a practice for PACER specifically, but it should be.)
- DangitBobby 4mo agoThere's "can't afford" and "can't justify the expense". I'm certainly not poor and at basically no amount above free would I justify the expense. So any cost is completely unacceptable, especially given how much the public pays to produce these results. No more excuses, no more lame justifications, no more hiding.
- mjd 4mo agoPACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter. That's about 150 pages of material.
- BenjiWiebe 4mo ago$30/quarter, so ~300 pages. Also noticed that the fee is capped at $3/document, but I don't know how often a single document is longer then 30 pages.
- alexpotato 4mo agoSo interesting point about things being public vs not: If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not. If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests. My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"
- fogof 4mo agoDo you think there is a tradeoff in this case? If so, what is the best counterargument against making PACER records free? I think it's important to note, as the article does, that these records are already "public" (that's what the "P" stands for) what's at issue is whether you should be charged a fee to access them.
- functionmouse 4mo agoban lobbying
- markhahn 4mo agowhat's the problem with everyone knowing how a rep votes? their voting should be a matter of record, not any form of leverage. the dumpsterfire of campaign finance is completely orthogonal (and also both important and simple to solve).
- queeshonda 4mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 4mo agoMakes sense. Courts serve the public. It makes no sense to pay twice for that.
- jacobmarble 4mo agoPACER is for federal courts, price is $1 per page. I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10.
- david_shi 4mo agoHow did you find out? Did they serve you like in the movies?
- da_chicken 4mo agoWell, there probably wasn't a concession stand.
- tptacek 4mo agoPACER isn't even close to $1/page, and if you spend less than $30 (which is rather a lot of pages) in a quarter, it's free.
- ipython 4mo agoPacer is $0.10/page. https://www.caeb.uscourts.gov/documents/Forms/EDC/EDC.002-036.pdf https://www.caeb.uscourts.gov/documents/Forms/EDC/EDC.002-03...
- jacobmarble 4mo agoOops, I should know better. Thanks for the correction.
- jacobmarble 4mo agoEmbarrassed. PACER is $0.10 per page, Idaho courts charge $1.00 per page.
- user3939382 4mo ago> the public should not have to pay to read the law This goes back to Hammurabi. These decisions are the law. We pay tax dollars to create all this and even if we didn’t, if we’re held to these rulings we need to be able to read them.
- qingcharles 4mo agoStatutes are free by law. There was a case a few years ago that definitively affirmed this. A lot of counties and municipalities have zoning laws and building codes, but they don't have staff to write them, so they buy stock model codes from a corporation that writes them. These venues were then telling their citizens they couldn't give them a free copy, they had to buy them. Someone got sued for copyright infringement for giving away a copy of the statues, but they ultimately won. See e.g., Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (2020) & Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l (5th Cir. 2002).
- derektank 4mo agoCase law is real law in a common law system. Parent is absolutely correct to point out that without access to court records, the public does not have a complete understanding of the law. Statutes only provide you the full picture in a civil law system.
- qingcharles 4mo agoAgreed, e.g. case law provides interpretation of statutes to clarify their meaning. I just wanted to point out that the free-as-in-beer nature of statutes has been completely clarified, whereas case law and court records continue in some murky grey zone.
- 0x59 4mo agoIf anything it'd be free for approved partners. Think large legal firms, language model data collectors, etc
- carlosjobim 4mo agoThe entire reason to have a code of laws at all is to make justice a public matter. Otherwise we are back to blood feuds and might is right, if justice is to be a secret matter. Approved partner is any living and breathing human.
- 0x59 4mo agoI agree with you and am acknowledging that knowledge is power and controlled by the powerful.
- treebeard901 4mo agoFinancial cost is one if the many ways the Government intentionally limits your access to your ability to uphold your rights.
- tptacek 4mo agoThe discourse over PACER fees recapitulates a very common public policy conundrum, and we should all be more thoughtful about discussing it. In the municipality where I live, we're statutorily required to replace lead service lines[†] within the next 5-10 years (I forget how many). The municipality replaces the trunk lines, and homeowners are required to replace the last hop at their own (significant) expense. Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this. But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own. A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession. That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses. I don't know, things are complicated. [†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ipython 4mo agoThe problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall. Yes everything costs money. But we expect that the government would provide services for the greater good of its citizens. I can step foot in some of the greatest museums in the world for free in downtown dc. As a citizen I can get (and have) a reading card for the Library of Congress. For free. Are these services being provided by volunteers? No. My tax dollars pay for it. So should it fund electronic record keeping for legal proceedings.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- andunie 4mo agothis is for sure
- Backslasher 4mo agoA bit tangential. In Israel, case records are sort-of-free. They're publicly available in a byzantine system maintained by the Court Management, a governmental entity (Net Hamishpat, "court net" - slightly deviating from Beit Hamishpat meaning "the court", https://www.court.gov.il/NGCS.Web.Site/HomePage.aspx https://www.court.gov.il/NGCS.Web.Site/HomePage.aspx), but it is not where cases and material are referenced from in the public sphere or legal docs. Most professionals subscribe to Nevo (https://www.nevo.co.il/ https://www.nevo.co.il/), which is a "repository" of cases, law (updated to the latest revisions) etc. Even official court documents say "as seen in Nevo". They sometimes release tidbits of info to the common (unregistered) man, but searches etc are paywalled. There are other similar systems from other companies. It seems that Nevo and co are slurping the material via a sliding-window (~7 days back) doc-dump that the Court Management lets people access as long as they commit to removing cases that the Court Management tells them to remove. There is one renegade (Tola'at Hamishpat, "court worm" https://תולעת-המשפט.קום/ https://xn----8hcborozt8bdd.xn--9dbq2a/) which is not using this doc-dump and instead scrapes the gov website. They're doing it to not be bound by the agreement for removing documents, which they say they'll only do if they get forwarded a court order that the case is now classified. This is because the Court Management, which is not populated by judges but rather admin people, sometimes instructs removal of cases too freely (without a court order), which clouds the principle of public availability according to the Tola'at operators. There are other sites which purport to allow free access to cases, but they're usually low-level scrapers and don't allow a full-enough view. As an "information wants to be free" person, I find this entire saga fascinating. Article about Tola'at people (Hebrew): https://www.themarker.com/weekend/2025-12-26/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/0000019b-49df-d034-ab9b-c9dff81c0000 https://www.themarker.com/weekend/2025-12-26/ty-article-maga...
- rmunn 4mo agoA point of interest, which many HN readers may already know but I'm mentioning in case anyone doesn't: although court records on PACER cost a fee to access (at least currently they do), they are not copyrighted, and once you have obtained a copy, you are free to redistribute it. That's why sites like RECAP can exist.
- Henchman21 4mo agoA tangent perhaps, but the law itself should also be available to all for no cost.
- silexia 4mo agoI would love for all court records, federal and state and local, to be public. But special interests keep gaining more and more advantage over the public in every area. Especially attorneys.
- zftnb666 4mo agoPublic records should be public. Charging for them is just a tax on knowing the law.