The day that PACER gets fixed is the day judges stop using WordPerfect.
PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the bit about "privatization." PACER is run by the judiciary.
The judiciary sees it as a profit center. Folks have offered to essentially buy the data and make it entirely public. But they see too much profit from it
Of course nobody is "profiting." There are no shareholders getting dividends or execs getting bonuses. They use it fund the operations of the judiciary in the face of a shortage of funding from Congress.
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any way to obtain this old data through a FOIA? Or do those requests not apply to US courts?
Alas, 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.
Well that's depressing.
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alas, 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.
Well that's depressing.
Yep. Though Congress could liberate all of PACER, retrospective and prospective, if it chose -- one data dump to Carl Malamud would do it. The appropriations bills are wending their way through the legislative process right now (mostly out of committee), and that might be a vehicle to add a one-line amendment. Would require a lot of work in the next month or two.
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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 wh…
You'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/g…
Sure, 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/ right now. :)
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that's depressing.
Yep. Though Congress could liberate all of PACER, retrospective and prospective, if it chose -- one data dump to Carl Malamud would do it. The appropriations bills are wending their way through the legislative process right now (mostly out of committee), and that might be a vehicle to add a one-line amendment. Would require a lot of work in the next month or two.
Who do I call or who's door do I bang on?
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Though Congress could liberate all of PACER, retrospective and prospective, if it chose -- one data dump to Carl Malamud would do it. The appropriations bills are wending their way through the legislative process right now (mostly out of committee), and that might be a vehicle to add a one-line amendment. Would require a lot of work in the next month or two.
Who do I call or who's door do I bang on?
I'd point you in the direction of Carl Malamud, Jim Harper at the Cato Institute, and EFF, probably in that order. Jim's made it a project to liberate government data; Carl's gone further and made it his life's work.
Inside Congress itself? Hmm. I'm spending my time working on http://recent.io/ and now paying close attention nowadays. But if you're local to the SF south bay try Rep. Lofgren? I've done some Q&As with her and found she's one of the smarter and well-informed members of Congress on tech policy issues.
Re: PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time to Fix PACER
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The judiciary sees it as a profit center. Folks have offered to essentially buy the data and make it entirely public. But they see too much profit from it
Of course nobody is "profiting." There are no shareholders getting dividends or execs getting bonuses. They use it fund the operations of the judiciary in the face of a shortage of funding from Congress.
Except, of course, that PACER has various requirements that conflict with this, and they make as hard as possible to keep this profit (which was 150 million in 2008) up.
For example written opinions that "set forth a reasoned explanation for a court's decision" must be free of charge.
They make it is as difficult as possible to access this, and do not allow any sort of bulk download, because doing so would make PACER/courtweb less useful as a pay service.