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Court Records Should Be Free

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Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#81

Post by Scoundreller »

qingcharles wrote: post #76
cdolan wrote: post #7

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!

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!

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#82

Post by Scoundreller »

tptacek wrote: post #44
cdolan wrote: post #7

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!

For the most part, RECAP just eliminates inconvenience. For matters of widespread interest, RECAP saves thousands of people from having to make PACER accounts. But the stuff that ends up on RECAP, for obvious reasons, tends to be the small minority of cases that the public is interested in, and for the most part that content is practically (sometimes literally) free. I think RECAP rules a lot and I have the plugins e…

Sometimes you hit the sweet spot where you’re using up your $30 “free” credit and letting someone else use theirs for the next batch of documents. I don’t find it hard to find stuff that others haven’t submitted to RECAP.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#83

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other

Which is a major difference between that and PACER, since they're serving text and the marginal cost of more people having access to it is essentially zero.

If you make the homeowners pay for the service line replacement, the number of service lines that will be replaced is the same. If you make the public pay for access to the law, this happens:

> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces.

...because everyone else is priced out by the fees, or even just the friction of having to configure payments for someone who is only going to use it infrequently. Which means the general public loses out on having access to something it would have a negligible marginal cost to give them.

Imagine, for example, an open source project to search or otherwise process court opinions, which then needs access to all of them. If the government is charging per page, that's completely infeasible. If there is a public torrent of all the opinions, people get to do interesting things they currently can't. And this is not just public information but legal precedent that everyone is expected to comply with -- and yet is being charged to even read it.

Also, this isn't right even for the service lines:

> 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.

As a minor point, municipalities get their revenue predominantly from property tax, which is collected from property owners.

The main issue is that the outlay is a fixed cost. The cost of replacing the service line will generally be similar for a $200k house as for a $2M house. Meanwhile taxes are collected in proportion to property value or income. If you tax everyone by even a flat X percent in order to give everyone a flat Y dollar amount benefit, the result is a progressive effective rate curve, because everyone gets e.g. a $10,000 benefit but a lower income person is paying $2500 in tax while a higher income person is paying $25,000, making the lower income person's net transfers to the government not just low but negative.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#84

Post by Backslasher »

A bit tangential. In Israel, case records are sort-of-free.

They're publicly available in a byzantine system maintained by the Court Management, a governmental entity (Net Hamishpat, "court net" - slightly deviating from Beit Hamishpat meaning "the court", https://www.court.gov.il/NGCS.Web.Site/HomePage.aspx), but it is not where cases and material are referenced from in the public sphere or legal docs.

Most professionals subscribe to Nevo (https://www.nevo.co.il/), which is a "repository" of cases, law (updated to the latest revisions) etc. Even official court documents say "as seen in Nevo". They sometimes release tidbits of info to the common (unregistered) man, but searches etc are paywalled. There are other similar systems from other companies.

It seems that Nevo and co are slurping the material via a sliding-window (~7 days back) doc-dump that the Court Management lets people access as long as they commit to removing cases that the Court Management tells them to remove.

There is one renegade (Tola'at Hamishpat, "court worm" https://xn----8hcborozt8bdd.xn--9dbq2a/) which is not using this doc-dump and instead scrapes the gov website. They're doing it to not be bound by the agreement for removing documents, which they say they'll only do if they get forwarded a court order that the case is now classified. This is because the Court Management, which is not populated by judges but rather admin people, sometimes instructs removal of cases too freely (without a court order), which clouds the principle of public availability according to the Tola'at operators.

There are other sites which purport to allow free access to cases, but they're usually low-level scrapers and don't allow a full-enough view.

As an "information wants to be free" person, I find this entire saga fascinating.

Article about Tola'at people (Hebrew): https://www.themarker.com/weekend/2025-12-26/ty-article-maga...

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#85

Post by AnthonyMouse »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #71
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 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.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#86

Post by SkiFire13 »

tptacek wrote: post #59
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...…

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

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#87

Post by jacobmarble »

ipython wrote: post #49
jacobmarble wrote: post #28

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.

Pacer is $0.10/page. https://www.caeb.uscourts.gov/documents/Forms/EDC/EDC.002-03...

Oops, I should know better. Thanks for the correction.

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#89

Post by bebe83939 »

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.

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).

Re: Court Records Should Be Free

#90

Post by rmunn »

A point of interest, which many HN readers may already know but I'm mentioning in case anyone doesn't: although court records on PACER cost a fee to access (at least currently they do), they are not copyrighted, and once you have obtained a copy, you are free to redistribute it. That's why sites like RECAP can exist.
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