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!
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Court Records Should Be Free
61–70 of 151 posts
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#62Earlier 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…
You're almost there but not completing the circuit. Could tax dollars pay for "free" PACER access? Absolutely they could. But is that policy distributionally (a) regressive, (b) progressive, or (c) neutral? The answer is probably (a). The tax dollars come out of everybody's pocket. The benefits accrue disproportionately to a wealthy professional class. I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: R…
Who ultimately pays the fees from pacer? You’re telling me that, out of the goodness of their hearts, the lawyers take it out of their own paycheck?
You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms.
Now if that cost were to go to zero- no I don’t think the lawyers will charge less. But I do think that even the presence of a paywall reinforces the perceived scarcity of the legal profession. My thought is that if these documents were available more freely, we would see more democratization of the legal system.
For example, small claims doesn’t require legal representation. But knowing previous case law could definitely help even a lay person prepare a case.
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#63The 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…
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
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#64The 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…
Excellent analogy. One note. As a result of a settlement, PACER waives usage fees under $30 per quarter, apparently on the theory that lawyers will rack up more than that while the general public won’t. Doesn’t totally fix the problem but it does move in that direction.
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for corporate lawyers and a handful of highly successful biglaw attorneys, the law profession isn’t as profitable as it once was. Student loans and creeping costs have done a lot of damage. Same with many doctors who are having to go work for group practices owned by PE firms. Free PACER access might actually help average people get better legal representation by reducing the cost burden on the small independe…
I think if you do the math on this you're going to find that PACER fees are not really a significant component of the cost of representation. Westlaw/Lexis-Nexis maybe?
Fair, I agree that those are a much bigger component. Still, every little reduction in cost probably helps. The cost of education is the real killer but I have no idea how to fix that.
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#66The 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…
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…
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.
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're almost there but not completing the circuit. Could tax dollars pay for "free" PACER access? Absolutely they could. But is that policy distributionally (a) regressive, (b) progressive, or (c) neutral? The answer is probably (a). The tax dollars come out of everybody's pocket. The benefits accrue disproportionately to a wealthy professional class. I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: R…
Who ultimately pays the fees from pacer? You’re telling me that, out of the goodness of their hearts, the lawyers take it out of their own paycheck? You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms. Now if that cost were to go to zero- no I don’t think the lawyers will charge less. But I do think that even the presence of a paywall reinforces the perceived scarcity of t…
Sure, that's absolutely the case, but people overwhelmingly aren't involved in federal litigation. PACER is operating in an entirely different universe to local small claims courts.
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who ultimately pays the fees from pacer? You’re telling me that, out of the goodness of their hearts, the lawyers take it out of their own paycheck? You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms. Now if that cost were to go to zero- no I don’t think the lawyers will charge less. But I do think that even the presence of a paywall reinforces the perceived scarcity of t…
Sure, that's absolutely the case, but people overwhelmingly aren't involved in federal litigation. PACER is operating in an entirely different universe to local small claims courts.
Admittedly a niche use case but I used pacer to research tcpa cases in order to bring litigation (successfully) against telemarketers in local courts.
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#69this is for sure
Re: Court Records Should Be Free
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)