Court Records Should Be Free

panny

>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-...

musicale

Free to humans possibly.

stainablesteel

there was a website for this https://courtwatch.us/

cdolan

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!

anon373839

I 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.

alexpotato

So 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"

shevy-java

Makes sense. Courts serve the public. It makes no sense to pay twice for that.

jacobmarble

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.

user3939382

> 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.

0x59

If anything it'd be free for approved partners. Think large legal firms, language model data collectors, etc

treebeard901

Financial cost is one if the many ways the Government intentionally limits your access to your ability to uphold your rights.

tptacek

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.

andunie

this is for sure