- PACER (law)
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For other uses, see Pacer (disambiguation).
PACER (acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is an electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. It allows users to obtain case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts.
Each court maintains its own system, with a small subset of information from each case is transferred to the U.S. Party/Case Index, located in San Antonio, Texas at the PACER Service Center, server each night. Records are submitted to the individual courts using the Federal Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, and usually accepts the filing of documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF) through the courts' electronic filing system. Each court maintains its own databases with case information. Because PACER database systems are maintained within each court, each jurisdiction will have a different URL.
PACER has been criticized for being technically out of date and hard to use, and for demanding fees for records which are in the public domain. In reaction, non-profit projects have begun to make such documents available online for free.
Contents
Available information
The PACER System offers electronic access to case dockets to retrieve information such as:
- A listing of all parties and participants including judges, attorneys, and trustees
- A compilation of case related information such as cause of action, case number, nature of suit, and dollar demand
- A chronology of dates of case events entered in the case record
- A claims registry
- A listing of new cases each day
- Appellate court opinions
- Judgments or case status
- Types of documents filed for certain cases
- Many courts offer imaged copies of documents
History
PACER started in 1988 as a system accessible only by terminals in libraries and office buildings.[1] Starting in 2001, PACER was being made available over the Web.[1]
Costs, revenues and free alternatives
The United States Congress has given the Judicial Conference of the United States authority to impose user fees for electronic access to case information. All registered agencies or individuals are charged a user fee.
The fee, as of 2006, to access the web-based PACER systems is $0.08 per page. Prior to January 1, 2005, the fee was $0.07 per page. The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum charge of $2.40 for electronic access to any single document.
In March 2001, the Judicial Conference of the United States decided that no fee would be owed until a user accrued more than $10 worth of charges in a calendar year. If an account does not accrue $10 worth of usage between January 1 and December 31 of a year, the amount owed would be zeroed. In March 2010, that limit was effectively quadrupled, with users not billed unless their charges exceed $10 in a quarterly billing period.[2]
In compliance with the E-Government Act of 2002, written opinions that "set forth a reasoned explanation for a court's decision"[3] are free of charge.
Fee revenues get plowed back to the courts to finance technology. The New York Times reported PACER revenues exceeded costs by about $150 million, as of 2008 according to court reports.[4] In 2009, the Los Angeles Times gave the yearly revenue as $10 million.[5]
Reception
The New York Times has criticized PACER as "cumbersome, arcane and not free".[4] In 2008, an effort led by Carl Malamud (who asserted that the PACER is "15 to 20 years out of date" and that it should not demand fees for documents which are in the public domain) spent $600,000 in contributions to put a 50 years archive of records from the federal courts of appeals online for free.[4]
Also in 2008, district courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office (GPO), opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. After activist Aaron Swartz, following an appeal by Malamud, downloaded about 20% of the entire database using a library computer[6], to make them freely available to the public on public.resource.org, the experiment was ended in late September 2008, with a notice from the GPO that the pilot program was suspended, “pending an evaluation.” In October, a GPO representative said that "the security of the Pacer service was compromised".[4] A FOIA request revealed later that the FBI had opened a full investigation against Swartz, which was dropped in April.[6]
In 2009, a team from Princeton University and Harvard University's Berkman Center created a software called "RECAP"[7] which allows users to automatically search for free copies during a PACER search, and to help building up a free alternative database at the Internet Archive.[1] It is a Firefox extension which for each PACER document first checks if has already been uploaded by another user to the Internet Archive; if no free version exists and the user purchases the document from PACER, it will automatically upload a copy to the Internet Archive.[1]
Other alternative sites republishing PACER documents include justia.com[1], the proprietary LexisNexis, which makes a copy of the whole database available[6], and Google Scholar[8].
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e Bobbie Johnson (11 November 2009). "Recap: cracking open US courtrooms". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/11/recap-us-courtrooms.
- ^ EPA Fee Schedule Update (EPA = Electronic Public Access)
- ^ "Free Written Opinions" ([dead link]). http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/announcements/general/dc_ecf_opinion.html
- ^ a b c d John Schwartz (February 12, 2009). "An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?pagewanted=all.
- ^ Michael Hiltzik: These crusaders bring transparency to government LA Times, September 28, 2009
- ^ a b c Ryan Singel: FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records Wired.com, October 5, 2009
- ^ https://www.recapthelaw.org/
- ^ https://www.recapthelaw.org/2009/11/20/google-project-shows-value-of-open-judicial-records/
External links
Categories:- Legal software
- Judicial branch of the United States government
- Government databases in the United States
- Online law databases
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