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Court Records Should Be Free

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Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#111

Post by District5524 »

anon373839 wrote: post #12
nonethewiser wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do you think they should be public?

Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”. That type of information access wasn't even fathomable when the concept of public records was born. It enables a lot of uses where I would argue that the harms outweigh the benefits.

Just trying to remind people that in most countries outside the US, there is nothing like PACER. Even in the UK, it's usually just judgments that are freely available, see https://www.bailii.org/ and https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. Even with the recent expected extension of "Public Documents", accessing the claim form or other statements of cases will depend on the court making an order https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rule....

And for non-common law jurisdictions, even the UK level of publicity of judgments is rarely available - anonymisation is a prerequisite: https://homoki.net/en/2024/02/01/On_Anonymisation_of_court_d...

So, for many countries, it's not just that sealed documents are not accessible, many people in traditional democracies couldn't imagine and bear this level of publicity for every court document like you have in the US.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#112

Post by howard941 »

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…

Attorneys use PACER (fed by CM/ECF) to retrieve pleadings. Very little is done with hardcopy anymore.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#113

Post by mistrial9 »

bebe83939 wrote: post #89
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus homeowner may decide to skip electric utility completely, and go with isolated home solar. Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).

other extreme case, California, where electricity costs are a large multiple of US averages, and the utility company owns military equipment. PG&E + minions monitor every connection, and charge to connect to the grid. High quality solar cannot be connected to the grid by regulation, not law, unless supervised by PG&E and minions. Naturally the regulations de facto equate to a monthly bill in a certain non-free range, no matter how much effort the client site makes.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#114

Post by tptacek »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #94
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…

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…

Right, but I fixate on the fact that we could easily solve the journalism problem without making it free. Just raise the free tier cap.

Making PACER entirely free is regressive, absent some new scheme to single out the lawyers (like a dedicated lawyer tax or something, which runs into constitutional problems.)

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#115

Post by tptacek »

thrance wrote: post #92
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now apply that logic to healthcare. Single payers are able to get much better deals.

Not really, no. Medicare wildly overpays for everything compared to the rest of the world.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#116

Post by tptacek »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #70
tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My expectation would be that the costs of operating the PACER system encompass a lot of basic costs of handling filing and docket management that aren't relevant to passive consumers of PACER, but that don't have a clean interface to charge at otherwise, in much the same way that gas taxes are in significant part a tax to fund maintenance of roadways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 > I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-... Government’s PACE…

That's missing my point. I too believe that the cost of serving static files is effectively epsilon. But that's not all PACER fees pay for.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#117

Post by bebe83939 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #113
bebe83939 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus homeowner may decide to skip electric utility completely, and go with isolated home solar. Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).

other extreme case, California, where electricity costs are a large multiple of US averages, and the utility company owns military equipment. PG&E + minions monitor every connection, and charge to connect to the grid. High quality solar cannot be connected to the grid by regulation, not law, unless supervised by PG&E and minions. Naturally the regulations de facto equate to a monthly bill in a certain non-free range,…

> High quality solar

> no matter how much effort the client site makes

I doubt solar provides stable predictable current 24/7 with warranty amd penalties. That is the hard part, and what it takes to be "high quality".

State sized grid is not a joke.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#118

Post by BenjiWiebe »

mjd wrote: post #25
anon373839 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. 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.)

PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter. That's about 150 pages of material.

$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.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#119

Post by toomuchtodo »

tptacek wrote: post #116
toomuchtodo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 > I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-... Government’s PACE…

That's missing my point. I too believe that the cost of serving static files is effectively epsilon. But that's not all PACER fees pay for.

Your point is taken, it’s simply a philosophical debate between public funding and user fees, and if the system is exposing the right folks to the relevant majority of costs vs socializing the costs broadly. My position is that if the costs are relatively insignificant, socializing them is simply more efficient. I accept others may have a different philosophical take. I suppose user and landing fees in US general and commercial aviation are a similar analogy for comparison in the support of fee collection.
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