Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy has launched Open PACER, a site for crowdsourcing the drafting of The Open PACER Act of 2013.
The intent of the bill is to make the PACER federal judicial database accessible free of charge to the public.
The bill currently reads:
The federal courts shall charge no fee for public access to information or documents described in subsection (a) [i.e., the content of PACER], or for any services provided by the court to the public for searching or indexing such information or documents.
In his post about Open PACER, Steve writes that the Open PACER Act “is drafted in Legislative XML, allows you to comment, and the code is available on github.”
Click here for the slides and transcript of the presentation.
Click here for other work by Steve on increasing public access to PACER.
Tags: Court data, Court information systems, Crowdsourcing legislative drafting, Free access to law, Judicial data, Judicial information systems, Legal open government data, Legislative crowdsourcing, Open PACER, openPACER, PACER, Public access to legal information, Stephen Schultze, Steve Schultze
