>The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs.
I actually approve of the something closer to the status quo here. Court filings contain a lot of sensitive information about the litigants.
It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.
So interesting point about things being public vs not:
If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.
If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.
My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"
> the public should not have to pay to read the law
This goes back to Hammurabi. These decisions are the law. We pay tax dollars to create all this and even if we didn’t, if we’re held to these rulings we need to be able to read them.
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.
Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this.
But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. 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.
A similar dilemma faces PACER. 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... funding the legal profession.
That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses.
I don't know, things are complicated.
[†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.
We know where all the money in this system is: it's in LexisNexis and Westlaw. Each of them has revenue over $3B, individually. Presumably they have some lesser-known competitors. PACER fees are $150M. What percentage of PACER fees are paid by LexisNexis and Westlaw anyway in the course of their data ingestion? I'm not sure it really matters, we could simply restructure with a new tax on value-add services like LexisNexis that pulls in $200M, make PACER free, and everyone would be happier, probably including the value-add legal service providers.
The problem is threefold: the true marginal cost of a PACER page is closer to 0 than 10 cents; the fixed cost (building an electronic record system) is already paid by the public; and the complication of a price discrimination mechanism would drive up that marginal cost rather than capture true willingness to pay.
This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.
Fiscally? Sure. In terms of liberty? Absolutely not. We are talking about public access to law, which is foundational to a free society.
Federal courts are not strictly limited by tax revenue in the same way that state courts are, and I am more sympathetic to this line of argument on the state level. Finding replacement revenue is a legitimate concern, but a secondary one due to the federal government's deficit spending privilege.
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.
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.
I would love for all court records, federal and state and local, to be public. But special interests keep gaining more and more advantage over the public in every area. Especially attorneys.
25 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadhttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
https://courtwatch.us/
Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.
Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!
It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.
If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.
If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.
My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"
I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10.
This goes back to Hammurabi. These decisions are the law. We pay tax dollars to create all this and even if we didn’t, if we’re held to these rulings we need to be able to read them.
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.
Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this.
But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. 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.
A similar dilemma faces PACER. 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... funding the legal profession.
That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses.
I don't know, things are complicated.
[†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.
This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.
Fiscally? Sure. In terms of liberty? Absolutely not. We are talking about public access to law, which is foundational to a free society.
Federal courts are not strictly limited by tax revenue in the same way that state courts are, and I am more sympathetic to this line of argument on the state level. Finding replacement revenue is a legitimate concern, but a secondary one due to the federal government's deficit spending privilege.
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...