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- Hacker News
- I 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.by silexia
- A tangent perhaps, but the law itself should also be available to all for no cost.by Henchman21
- Makes sense. Courts serve the public. It makes no sense to pay twice for that.by shevy-java
- Financial cost is one if the many ways the Government intentionally limits your access to your ability to uphold your rights.by treebeard901
- >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-...
by panny - Isn't the replacement for CM/ECF, ACMS?by Grazester
- courtlistener 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!
by cdolan - For 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.
by tptacek - I'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?by qingcharles
- PACER 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.
by jacobmarble - Embarrassed. PACER is $0.10 per page, Idaho courts charge $1.00 per page.by jacobmarble
- PACER 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.by tptacek
- How did you find out? Did they serve you like in the movies?by david_shi
- Pacer is $0.10/page. https://www.caeb.uscourts.gov/documents/Forms/EDC/EDC.002-03...by ipython
- > 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.
by user3939382 - Statutes 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).
by qingcharles - The 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.
by tptacek - The 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.
by ipython - >Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic
You would really enjoy reading Chief Justice Roberts' end of 2023 State of the US Federal Courts paper [†][ <6 pages ]. He discusses how their system has always been antiquated, resistant to change... but how significantly LLMs are going to change commoners' (like us!) access to the judicial system.
There are also many humorous musings about past Justices' hatred of new technology, and that ~"if some former Justices could they'd have gotten rid of most associates, too; but they were still technologically necessary"~.
[†] <https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...>
----
My own forty-something brother is currently a state-level judge, and he still uses a typewriter, by choice, for more-privileged correspondence.
State of our times, l-onestar.
- > 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.
One of those protectionist policies is charging for PACER itself.
The costs of running PACER are absolutely trivial in comparison to the costs of running the judiciary. To the point that even bringing the point up is disingenuous to the point that it discredits everything else you say.
Case law is law. People are required to obey the law. They should be able to access the law so they can know how to follow it. It's that simple.
by stult - We know where all the money in this system is: it's in LexisNexis and Westlaw. Each of them has revenue over $3B, individually. Presumably they have some lesser-known competitors. PACER fees are $150M. What percentage of PACER fees are paid by LexisNexis and Westlaw anyway in the course of their data ingestion? I'm not sure it really matters, we could simply restructure with a new tax on value-add services like LexisNexis that pulls in $200M, make PACER free, and everyone would be happier, probably including the value-add legal service providers.
- this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason
but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses
(per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/)
courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy
by awinter-py - > 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.
Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.
- As a non-attorney that has also used PACER, I don't think of it in quite these terms. Sure maybe there's some level of public subsidy by making it free, but like you say, relative to the legal profession that subsidy per lawyer is at the noise floor. On the other hand, the value of making it free to people outside the legal profession is well worth the degree to which we'd be subsidizing the people in it.
For example, journalists. There's enormous investigative journalism value in the documents that have been filed in court. People say all sorts of shit in affidavits which turns out to be relevant outside the context they intended it for. PACER should be free, if nothing else than for the public interest value of its content (outside as well as inside the court).
by IIAOPSW - The two aren’t quite identical.
The municipality could service all the homes and pay for it with taxes, probably using their own people or a negotiated contract.
The private (and usually no -savvy) individual has much less negotiating power and is going to get taken to the cleaners by a plumber. Three houses in a street are likely to have 3 different plumbers on 3 different dates.
It’s just like that the cost per square foot to pave a single driveway vs the entire sidewalk or foundations for a whole neighborhood.
by BobbyTables2 - A 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.by rmunn