Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Court Records Should Be Free

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 151 posts

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#101

Post by cucumber3732842 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 squ…

The other side of that coin is that the homeowner is paying their own money and is therefore going to actually negotiate or shop around for the best price. Whereas the government is spending someone else's money and then the way the person choosing who to award the contract to gets to have more money in their own pocket is under the table.

The buyer has next to no negotiating leverage on a small (to the seller) job they're being compelled to purchase by the government.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#102

Post by lesuorac »

nativeit wrote: post #96
nativeit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this kind of argument a lot, but I have to assume the very noticeable ignorance of collective bargaining power in this framing is intentional?

The reason a vendor can fleece public services in the first place is, somewhat ironically, the limited access to free public records by independent journalists. I’d reckon we need more freedom of information, more regulatory oversight, and more participation by the public. The cynicism that governments are inherently dishonest and feckless (rather than being designed as-such by the self-interested lobbies pushing thi…

I've always thought the reason a vendor can fleece the public is a mixture of 2 things.

1) You get elected by convincing voters to vote for you. Which is not the same as actually getting the lowest prices.

2) Core competency has been stamped out of a lot of government agencies and so if you're a skill negotiator you want to be collecting the commission from the sales contract to the government as opposed to a low salary from being the government agent.

So at the end of the day, making all these contracts public wouldn't fix future ones from being issued. Although I'm still for more sunshine.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#103

Post by fireflash38 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #52
ipython wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

We should always be allowed to read and know the law we're required to follow. Preferrably for free or easily.

It's insane to me that this isn't the default view. How are you supposed to follow the law if you don't know what it is? Putting a price on it just makes it is basically criminalizing being poor.

Which is what we arguably have already considering the state of public defenders, jail, bail system, and how often the rich get off scot free for their crimes.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#104

Post by ProllyInfamous »

tptacek wrote: post #42

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. Natura…

>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 [†][ 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.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#105

Post by qup »

Scoundreller wrote: post #81
qingcharles wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

And a protip for non-US HN readers: you don’t need to be a US resident/citizen to get your own account and make requests and contribute to RECAP yourself!

Which types of foreign citizens are that interested in US court cases?

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#106

Post by ameister14 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #73
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...…

Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated. PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth. The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system…

>Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.

I don't know about that; I've used PACER a fair amount, despite also using Westlaw.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#107

Post by sokoloff »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #86
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter. I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.

$30/quarter doesn't look like a "free tier" in the first place

It is. If you incur less than $30 in PACER charges in a quarter, they waive the bill.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#108

Post by GaryBluto »

qup wrote: post #105
Scoundreller wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a protip for non-US HN readers: you don’t need to be a US resident/citizen to get your own account and make requests and contribute to RECAP yourself!

Which types of foreign citizens are that interested in US court cases?

The same type of eccentric foreign citizens you're likely to find here.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#109

Post by rootusrootus »

rootusrootus wrote: post #97
tptacek wrote: post #42

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. Natura…

The water line cost should be spread amongst whoever was allowed to vote to make it happen. If non-homeowners were allowed to force homeowners to upgrade, they can help fund it.

Oh my, got a downvote for that. Someone always thinks homeowners are out to spite the world and should be punished for the privilege. Never change, HN, never change.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#110

Post by qingcharles »

derektank wrote: post #98
qingcharles wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infringeme…

Case 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.

Agreed, 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.
Post reply on HN