7 ms·
PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
- MWil 12y agoI'll say it again: Bonkers!
- engined 12y agoPACER is definitely interesting, a bit antiquated, and to date, the data has mostly resided in the hands of the big information companies (Lexis, Westlaw, etc.). I've been building a system/website to access, search and develop intelligent analytics from PACER court information. We're tracking cases, attorneys, parties, judges, as well as the actual case dockets. The data is a treasure trove of information, and if anyone's interested, I'd be very happy to chat more about it. The site (a signup for now as I'm working out the kinks in the system) is www.docketleads.com. Email me there or ping me here for more info.
- declan 12y agoI worked on a similar project a decade ago written mostly in Perl with the frontend in PHP (hey, it was 2004, folks!). Just checked and I still even have the old courtbot.com domain I registered for the project. I suspect you'll find pretty quickly that there's a limit to how far regular expressions or similar techniques can take you if you want to normalize and reference precedents and make sense of cases. That's why Lexis and Westlaw pay actual attorneys considerable sums to summarize cases, and why they can still command such princely subscription fees even in 2014. But analytics might be interesting. A family member is a judge, and her judicial office keeps track of how many cases she decides per month, how many reversals she receives, etc. I don't know if those are made public -- certainly I'm not aware of any project to do it across a large data set, and I wish you luck with it.
- engined 12y agoYou're definitely right about case/precedent information, but what we've found is that there's a whole other world of info that can be neatly organized with a lot of crunching, and a small bit of manual manipulation. The big guys chasing this are highly focused almost entirely on lawyers, in the context of providing them case analysis tools. We've found a bit of a different niche which doesn't need as much fidelity/granularity to the information, but needs it nonetheless. In any case, I'd love to chat about your experience, even if a decade old. Can I PM you?
- declan 12y agoSure, happy to chat! What you're doing seems interesting, especially if you're not targeting the lawyer/case research market. My email address is in my HN profile. Though I am working nonstop on http://recent.io/ http://recent.io/ right now. :)
- r00fus 12y agoI wonder if Recap [1] would help in addressing the censorship/deletion issue. Ultimately, the way we fund these programs is the root the problem (and the privatization of what is supposed to be public data). [1] https://www.recapthelaw.org https://www.recapthelaw.org
- cjbprime 12y agoRecap only helps here if everyone accesses/pays for all of the files that are about to be deleted, and doing so would surely cost millions or billions.
- engined 12y agoRECAP hasn't been nearly as active as its initiators had hoped. The data there is pretty good however, and for a handful of key cases, I would say it's very good. The biggest issue with the data is that it's spotty. Since it relies on individuals to pull info on each case, some cases may only have partial information (not all the parties, attorneys, etc. represented), or not have the full docket available (and rarely, if ever, all of the documents associated with a case).
- anseljh 12y agoRECAP recently found a new home with the Free Law Project, so hopefully things will improve. http://freelawproject.org/2014/05/19/our-recap-partnership-with-princeton-universitys-citp/ http://freelawproject.org/2014/05/19/our-recap-partnership-w...
- rayiner 12y agoI don't get the bit about "privatization." PACER is run by the judiciary.
- Natsu 12y agoI assume they're confused by the part where it's run essentially for-profit by the government.
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- thrownaway2424 12y agoIt would cost Google negligible money to host this data and the only people who would be upset would be the rent-seeking jerks responsible for the current PACER debacle. And EDGAR after that.
- RubberSoul 12y agoWhat do you dislike about EDGAR? I find EDGAR to be pretty good. It's easy to search and completely free.
- amha 12y agoUn-fucking-believable. PACER has always been awful (I've used it since about 2005), but this is a new low---this is ACTIVE awfulness. I assume, based on the weird specificity of what they're removing, that the PACER office is doing this at the request of the individual courts. Which just sort of underscores how awful this is---that courts get to decide how public their own opinions are.
- thinkcomp 12y agoNot so. The AO forced the courts to do it according to two people at the Second Circuit. The most likely explanation is that as part of the "upgrade" of CM/ECF (the write component of PACER) they needed to jettison old databases that used a different schema. This is of course nonsense. They've likely spent over $100 million on this upgrade since 2007, though actual numbers are surprisingly hard to come by. For that price they could have probably afforded a few coders to convert the older databases over.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoIs there any way to obtain this old data through a FOIA? Or do those requests not apply to US courts?
- thinkcomp 12y agoNot really. You could try but I doubt it would get you anywhere. This needs Congressional attention. Of course, Congress is on vacation. Not that it would matter. Still, contact your representatives.
- declan 12y agoAlas, FOIA applies only to federal government agencies that are in the executive branch. It doesn't apply to federal courts or the U.S. Congress.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoWell that's depressing.
- oneweirdtrick 12y agoThe day that PACER gets fixed is the day judges stop using WordPerfect.