Schultze & Yu on the New RECAP Archive

Stephen Schultze and Harlan Yu, both of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, today announced (here and here) the launching of The RECAP Archive, a new Web interface to RECAP, the free database of U.S. federal court documents.

The RECAP Archive enables searching and browsing by court, case name, docket number, PACER case number, and/or date. In addition, according to Mr. Schultze’s post, The RECAP Archive has the following functions:

you can subscribe to an RSS feed for any case in order to get updates when new documents are added to the archive. We’ve also included some basic tagging features that let anybody add tags to any case.

The developers welcome feedback about The RECAP Archive.

Click here for more information about RECAP.

Video of 2008 Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records

Video is now available of some programs from the 6th Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records, held 6-7 November 2008 in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.

The posted programs are:

• What Is the Privacy Interest in Public Records?; and
• Charging for Access to Court Records: Promise and Pitfalls.

The video appears to have been posted on YouTube by Public.Resource.Org.

HT @harlanyu & Carl Malamud.

Video of 2010 Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records

Video is now available of some programs from the 7th Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records, held 4-5 March 2010 in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.

The posted programs are:

• Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?;
• Some Emerging Issues in E-Filing and E-Privacy; and
• Public Electronic Access to Federal Court Records (“PACER”): New Initiatives, New Challenges.

The video appears to have been posted on YouTube by Public.Resource.Org.

Click here for more information on the conference.

Click here for information on the DVD version of the video.

HT @harlanyu & Carl Malamud.

Schultze, What Does It Cost to Provide Electronic Public Access to Court Records?

Stephen Schultze of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has posted What Does It Cost to Provide Electronic Public Access to Court Records?, at his blog, Managing Miracles.

In his post, Schultze reports the results of an analysis of the costs and revenues of the U.S. federal courts’ PACER system, which provides fee-based public access to U.S. federal court records. Schultze contends that a U.S. federal statute requires the U.S. federal courts to spend PACER fees exclusively for the purpose of reimbursing the courts for the costs of providing the PACER system.

Drawing in part on research reported in his working paper about PACER fees, Schultze finds that PACER fees greatly exceed the costs of providing the PACER system to the public, and that the U.S. federal courts spend the excess PACER fee revenue for purposes unrelated to the costs of the PACER system. Further, Schultze analyzes the U.S. federal courts’ most recent projections of PACER costs, and alleges that those projections inaccurately characterize costs that are in fact unrelated to PACER, as PACER-related costs.

In addition, Schultze argues that the U.S. federal judiciary spends too much on PACER, because the current PACER system utilizes inefficient practices such as the maintenance of a decentralized and duplicative database architecture, and a U.S.-based customer service center.

Schultze contends that, by employing up-to-date information technology administration practices, the U.S. federal courts could substantially lower the costs of PACER, to the extent that the courts could affordably provide public access to PACER free of charge.

Schultze concludes by urging the U.S. federal courts also to provide free-of-charge access to PACER data in bulk — as the U.S. Government Printing Office now does respecting the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions for 1937-1975, and as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office now does respecting patent and trademark records — to enable third parties to use that data to create innovative information services of benefit to the public, as advocated by Robinson et al., Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

Schultze’s arguments seem consistent with the goals of the Law.gov legal open government data project.

Schultze on Electronic Public Access Fees and the United States Federal Courts’ Budget: An Overview

Stephen Schultze of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has posted Electronic Public Access Fees and the United States Federal Courts’ Budget: An Overview (2009). Here is the abstract:

This draft working paper examines the role of user fees for public access to records in the budgeting process of the federal courts. It sketches the policy principles that have traditionally motivated open access, describes the administrative process of court budgeting, and traces the path of user fees to their present-day instantiation. There has been considerable confusion about motivation and justification for the courts charge for access to PACER, the web-based system for “Public Access to Court Electronic Records.” Representatives from the Administrative Office of the Courts describe the policy as mandated by Congress and limited to reimbursing the expenses of operating the system. This paper identifies the sources of these claims and places them in the context of the increasing push to make government data freely accessible.

Changes to Access to U.S. Federal Court Records on PACER

Changes intended to enhance public access to U.S. federal court records through the PACER system were announced 16 March 2010 by the Judicial Conference of the United States.

PACER is the fee-based legal information service of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AOUSC) Public Access and Records Management Division.

According to the announcement, the Judicial Conference has approved the following measures:

• U.S. federal judges will be permitted “to make digital audio recordings of court hearings available online to the public through PACER, for $2.40 per audio file”;
• PACER users will not be charged for PACER usage “unless they accrue charges of more than $10 of PACER usage in a quarterly billing cycle”;
• A pilot program has been approved, under which a maximum of 12 U.S. federal courts may “publish … district and bankruptcy court opinions” free of charge “via the [U.S.] Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).”

The GPO FDsys pilot program seems consistent with the goals of the Law.gov legal open government data project.

The announcement appears to contain one partially inaccurate statement: “All court opinions are available through PACER free of charge, and that will not change.” This statement appears to be inaccurate in two respects, as I verified by PACER searches performed this week. First, many U.S. federal district court opinions placed in PACER prior to the installation of “District Court CM/ECF version 2.4″ — which appears to have occurred in most courts in 2005 or 2006 — are available to the public only for a fee (click here for the PACER document stating this policy; and see as an example the district court opinion in Parker v. District of Columbia, Civil Action No. 03-0213 (EGS) (D.D.C. Mar. 31, 2004), document number 35 on the docket numbered 1:03-cv-00213-EGS available via the D.D.C. PACER site).

Second, public users are charged a fee to access U.S. federal circuit court opinions through U.S. federal district court dockets accessible via U.S. federal circuit court PACER sites, and through federal district court PACER sites. See, e.g., the Eighth Circuit opinion in Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz, P.A. v. United States, No. 07-2405 (8th Cir. Sept. 4, 2008), available through the Eighth Circuit PACER site and the D. Minn. PACER site as document 56 on the docket numbered 0:05-cv-02626-JMR-FLN .

Employees of the AOUSC are currently reviewing the accuracy of the statement, “All court opinions are available through PACER free of charge, and that will not change.” I hope they will soon issue a correction to that statement. I am grateful to several AOUSC and PACER Service Center employees, and to Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy for their assistance this week respecting this issue.

Supreme Court Open Infrastructure Project

The Supreme Court Open Infrastructure Project, a new legal information dissemination effort, led by scholars including Professor Andrew D. Martin of Washington University and Professor Jerry Goldman of Northwestern University’s Department of Political Science, is now underway.

According to Daniel Martin Katz, the goal of the project is to create a freely available, central online repository of interoperable data about the U.S. Supreme Court, accessible by a wide range of users and easily integrated with other data and applications. Washington University’s Supreme Court Database is to serve as the platform for the repository. The project is related to a National Science Foundation grant devoted to extending the content of the database to include data from 1792 through 1946.

A meeting — attended by personnel from Northwestern University’s Oyez Project, the University of Maryland’s Digital Docket Project, the Computational Legal Studies blog, Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, Stanford Law School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium, and Washington University’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL) — to discuss plans for the project took place on 3-4 December 2009, at CERL. Reports on the meeting are available from Daniel Martin Katz and Mark Liberman.

The Supreme Court Open Infrastructure Project appears to offer an interesting example of the application of Open Data principles (see the explanatory article by Miller et al. here, and the related definition of “Open Knowledge” here) being implemented in connection with key legal information, by members of the academic community. This project complements law-related Open Data efforts taking place within government, such as the U.S. Government’s Open Government Directive, and the UK Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI)’s Single Legislation Service (SLS) (see details from Dr. John L. Sheridan via Dr. Adam Wyner here and here).

A selected list of additional law-related data resources (some open and some not) is available here, and a selected list of law-related Linked Data resources is available here.

Winn on Judicial Information Management in an Electronic Age

Peter A. Winn, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Office of the U.S. Attorney, Western District of Washington & and adjunct professor at the University of Washington School of Law, has published Judicial Information Management in an Electronic Age: Old Standards, New Challenges, forthcoming in Federal Courts Law Review. Here is the abstract:

“Under well established law, information in court records is open to the public, but it may be sealed upon a fact-based showing either that the information is not a matter of legitimate public concern or is sufficiently sensitive to need such protection. Under the former paper-based court record system, however, routine violations of these publcity standards were widely tolerated. At the same time, the practical obscurity of paper provided a default privacy benefit for negligently unsealed sensitive information. With the introduction of electonic filing, old improper sealing practices are now increasingly being exposed and criticised; while the dealth of practical obscurity has caused individuals with sensitive information in court files, to be increasingly exposed to harm. This article argues that restoring an appropriate homeostasis to the judicial information eco-system, where legitimate privacy and publicity interests are both protected, does not require replacing established common law standards; but it will require the adoption of new legal procedures, better use of information technologies, and more careful training of judges and lawyers. Ultimately, to properly achieve this goal, the existing common law adversarial system of information mangement will need to be supplemented by a new administrative model.”

HT Professor Paul Lomio.

Schultze on Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency

[NOTE: Updated on 29 September 2009 to link to the video of Stephen Schultze's presentation.]

Stephen Schultze, of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, will present Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency (video available here, HT Connie Crosby) on September 8, 2009, at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, to be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC. Here is the abstract:

“Until now, the conversation about government 2.0 has focused almost exclusively on just two of the three branches of government: the executive and legislative. Our project, called RECAP, takes this movement to the third branch—the judiciary. Today, government puts federal court records online in a system called PACER: Public Access to Electronic Court Records. Created by the courts in the late 1980s, the system was ahead of the curve when it first appeared. But today, PACER is a relic of an earlier era. It keeps documents behind a pay-wall, offering users metered access at eight cents per ‘page’ (effectively, per screenful). This pay-to-play model severely hinders widespread access to the law by activists, academics, the media and other concerned citizens with an interest in the judicial process. Fortunately, these public documents are not eligible for copyright, so once a document has been retrieved from PACER, it may be freely shared and reproduced. RECAP enables citizens to easily share federal court documents. The goal of this project, over time, is to publish an extensive archive to the public for free (as in beer). This will not only help people who are interested in a particular case, but will also pave the way for others to build more and better tools.

“In our talk, we plan discuss both the technical workings of RECAP, as well as the policy implications of our project. In particular, we will report on the current status of our collection, legal issues we have encountered and the larger policy context for our work.”

HT Tim O’Reilly.

Leith & McDonagh on Access to Court Records

My post about Philip Leith and Maeve McDonagh’s fine new article on access to court records in the UK and Europe is now at Law Librarian Blog.

To find other recent legal informatics scholarship, see the Preprints, Articles, Indexes, Dissertations, Conferences, and Monographs sections of our sister Website, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources.