Ask HN: Where is Aaron Swartz's federal court record dump?

33 points by jsjohns2 4y ago ↗ HN

In the USA, public access to federal court records is largely behind a paywall known as PACER. In 2009, Aaron Swartz downloaded somewhere between 1% and 25% of those records (~750GB) [1][2].

Where are those documents?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER [2] https://www.aaronswartzday.org/ny-times-pacer-project/

4 comments

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[dead] hikerclimber1 4y ago ↗

I think those records should be public.

[dead] hikerclimber1 4y ago ↗

Did you know that Elizabeth thernos is corrupt. She should go to jail for at least 5 years for what she did since money is the second most important thing in life. Also did you know the former ceo of Wells Fargo is corrupt. He is now an advisor at some other company. How is that allowed? Also remember Martha Stewart. Well she is now ceo of her company. So it always seem like rich people are given a Lesser sentence than those who are poor. Also why does google not write corrupt businessman or businesswoman in front of their names? It makes it seem like she is paying google.

schoen 4y ago ↗

I don't remember whether Aaron's downloads were added to this database or not (which means this isn't technically an answer to your question), but you can access a lot of PACER documents through

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/

https://free.law/recap

caseyscottmckay 4y ago ↗

I don't have a source for this, but I think I remember reading a long time ago that Swartz also downloaded and released a significant amount of WestLaw legal documents.

A few years ago I was looking for state law databases and came across a blog post by a professor (at Stanford I believe) discussing S3 buckets with state law databases. I couldn't figure out how to access it, so I emailed the professor and he gave me a link to a site called Public Resource Law or Free Public law or something ( domain was public.law.resource or resource.law or something like that). Anyway it had huge zip files (< 100 GB) for all federal law and all law for all 50 states (opinions, statutes, rules, regulations, jury instructions etc). I played around with the data and found WestLaw editors notes in several of the documents, making me think this was part of Swartz's WestLaw data dump. The data dump was taken down roughly a year after I found it.

I think this data dump is also what courtlistener.com is built on, because courtlistener.com popped up soon after the data dump disappeared from that site.