Court Records Should Be Free
eff.org355 points by hn_acker 15 hours ago
355 points by hn_acker 15 hours ago
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.
Article about Tola'at people (Hebrew): https://www.themarker.com/weekend/2025-12-26/ty-article-maga...
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.
> But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other
Which is a major difference between that and PACER, since they're serving text and the marginal cost of more people having access to it is essentially zero.
If you make the homeowners pay for the service line replacement, the number of service lines that will be replaced is the same. If you make the public pay for access to the law, this happens:
> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces.
...because everyone else is priced out by the fees, or even just the friction of having to configure payments for someone who is only going to use it once. Which means the general public loses out on having access to something it would have a negligible marginal cost to give them.
Imagine, for example, an open source project to search or otherwise process court opinions, which then needs access to all of them. If the government is charging per page, that's completely infeasible. If there is a public torrent of all the opinions, people get to do interesting things they currently can't. And this is not just public information but legal precedent that everyone is expected to comply with -- and yet is being charged to even read it.
The two aren’t quite identical.
The municipality could service all the homes and pay for it with taxes, probably using their own people or a negotiated contract.
The private (and usually no -savvy) individual has much less negotiating power and is going to get taken to the cleaners by a plumber. Three houses in a street are likely to have 3 different plumbers on 3 different dates.
It’s just like that the cost per square foot to pave a single driveway vs the entire sidewalk or foundations for a whole neighborhood.
Exactly what I was going to say. And exactly what’s intended: for someone to make money.
> 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.
Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.
Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.
PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth.
The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.
> They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.
So I'm not familiar with this area at all, but aren't only the major rulings annotated? Based off of this sibling comment [0] (which I have no idea is correct or not), PACER is mainly used for exhibits, briefs, and motions, and I wouldn't expect for LexisNexis and Westlaw to annotate these.
It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter.
I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.
this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason
but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses
(per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/)
courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy
My expectation would be that the costs of operating the PACER system encompass a lot of basic costs of handling filing and docket management that aren't relevant to passive consumers of PACER, but that don't have a clean interface to charge at otherwise, in much the same way that gas taxes are in significant part a tax to fund maintenance of roadways.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570
> I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...
Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)
> 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.
One of those protectionist policies is charging for PACER itself.
The costs of running PACER are absolutely trivial in comparison to the costs of running the judiciary. To the point that even bringing the point up is disingenuous to the point that it discredits everything else you say.
Case law is law. People are required to obey the law. They should be able to access the law so they can know how to follow it. It's that simple.
The problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall.
Yes everything costs money. But we expect that the government would provide services for the greater good of its citizens.
I can step foot in some of the greatest museums in the world for free in downtown dc. As a citizen I can get (and have) a reading card for the Library of Congress. For free. Are these services being provided by volunteers? No. My tax dollars pay for it. So should it fund electronic record keeping for legal proceedings.
Federal judicial opinions are readily available online. The circuit courts and Supreme Court--i.e., the courts which actually establish precedent--post all of their opinions on their own websites. If your concern is knowing what courts (at least federal courts, where PACER is used) are saying so that you can follow the law, it's all out there for free. What PACER hosts is the rest of the case records: exhibits, briefs, motions, etc.
You're almost there but not completing the circuit. Could tax dollars pay for "free" PACER access? Absolutely they could. But is that policy distributionally (a) regressive, (b) progressive, or (c) neutral? The answer is probably (a). The tax dollars come out of everybody's pocket. The benefits accrue disproportionately to a wealthy professional class.
I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: RECAP, and a free tier. If it's me, what you do is jack the free tier up from $30 to $1000.
Who ultimately pays the fees from pacer? You’re telling me that, out of the goodness of their hearts, the lawyers take it out of their own paycheck?
You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms.
Now if that cost were to go to zero- no I don’t think the lawyers will charge less. But I do think that even the presence of a paywall reinforces the perceived scarcity of the legal profession. My thought is that if these documents were available more freely, we would see more democratization of the legal system.
For example, small claims doesn’t require legal representation. But knowing previous case law could definitely help even a lay person prepare a case.
Sure, that's absolutely the case, but people overwhelmingly aren't involved in federal litigation. PACER is operating in an entirely different universe to local small claims courts.
Admittedly a niche use case but I used pacer to research tcpa cases in order to bring litigation (successfully) against telemarketers in local courts.
Except for corporate lawyers and a handful of highly successful biglaw attorneys, the law profession isn’t as profitable as it once was. Student loans and creeping costs have done a lot of damage. Same with many doctors who are having to go work for group practices owned by PE firms.
Free PACER access might actually help average people get better legal representation by reducing the cost burden on the small independent attorneys who don’t mingle with execs and politicians at the country club.
I think if you do the math on this you're going to find that PACER fees are not really a significant component of the cost of representation. Westlaw/Lexis-Nexis maybe?
Fair, I agree that those are a much bigger component. Still, every little reduction in cost probably helps. The cost of education is the real killer but I have no idea how to fix that.
> The problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall.
In 2026, this is similar to having secret laws, as your LLM might not have a subscription or know to tell you to get one
We should always be allowed to read and know the law we're required to follow. Preferrably for free or easily.
I agree with the analysis of lead service lines, but serving static files is lot cheaper than replacing underground pipes—so much cheaper that I think it’s qualitatively different.
Excellent analogy. One note. As a result of a settlement, PACER waives usage fees under $30 per quarter, apparently on the theory that lawyers will rack up more than that while the general public won’t. Doesn’t totally fix the problem but it does move in that direction.
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I am in fact not well educated. I earned (barely) a diploma from St. Ignatius College Prep (AMDG!) in Chicago in the mid-1990s, and that's it. So I think you have to grade me on a curve.
PACER is for federal courts, price is $1 per page.
I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10.
Pacer is $0.10/page. https://www.caeb.uscourts.gov/documents/Forms/EDC/EDC.002-03...
PACER isn't even close to $1/page, and if you spend less than $30 (which is rather a lot of pages) in a quarter, it's free.
courtlistener and the Recap program fill a vital niche at the moment.
Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.
Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!
I've been burning up every cent of my free $30/month PACER credit liberating important filings into RECAP for the last five years. The last year and a half of this administration has made this task very hard to keep up with as there are so many federal lawsuits and criminal cases. I just screwed up and accidentally went over my free limit so now I owe a real pound of flesh to the courts. Maybe my debt will be wiped out when the new Act is effective?
And a protip for non-US HN readers: you don’t need to be a US resident/citizen to get your own account and make requests and contribute to RECAP yourself!
For the most part, RECAP just eliminates inconvenience. For matters of widespread interest, RECAP saves thousands of people from having to make PACER accounts. But the stuff that ends up on RECAP, for obvious reasons, tends to be the small minority of cases that the public is interested in, and for the most part that content is practically (sometimes literally) free.
I think RECAP rules a lot and I have the plugins enabled in the browser session I use to read PACER. I'm just saying, it's not really a liberation of all of PACER.
Sometimes you hit the sweet spot where you’re using up your $30 “free” credit and letting someone else use theirs for the next batch of documents. I don’t find it hard to find stuff that others haven’t submitted to RECAP.
Agree -- RECAP is 100x easier to use than the official PACER. Plus RECAP is Google/LLM indexed, whereas PACER being paywalled means nothing is indexed, and their search is also annoying. In fact the whole PACER site has that real 1993 "I wrote this in perl with cgi-bin" feel.
Financial cost is one if the many ways the Government intentionally limits your access to your ability to uphold your rights.
> 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.
Statutes are free by law. There was a case a few years ago that definitively affirmed this. A lot of counties and municipalities have zoning laws and building codes, but they don't have staff to write them, so they buy stock model codes from a corporation that writes them. These venues were then telling their citizens they couldn't give them a free copy, they had to buy them.
Someone got sued for copyright infringement for giving away a copy of the statues, but they ultimately won.
See e.g., Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (2020) & Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l (5th Cir. 2002).
If anything it'd be free for approved partners. Think large legal firms, language model data collectors, etc
The entire reason to have a code of laws at all is to make justice a public matter. Otherwise we are back to blood feuds and might is right, if justice is to be a secret matter. Approved partner is any living and breathing human.
>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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Makes sense. Courts serve the public. It makes no sense to pay twice for that.
this is for sure
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Free to humans possibly.
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.
Material that shouldn't be published for any reason is already subject to a sealing process. What else is needed?
Just one example: PII of third parties is frequently attached in evidence supporting motions. In theory, careful redaction should be done, but it isn't, and those third parties aren't around to assert their privacy interests.
So wealthy people can go ahead and violate your privacy interests, but not really anyone else? I’m sorry, but this is a bad answer to the problem. The solution is to fix the redaction process, not to go with some awkward indirect solution that creates its own set of problems WITHOUT solving the original stated problem.
That's orthogonal to PACER fees. There's already a system in place for redacting and sealing documents that aren't suitable for public consumption. To a first approximation, ~everything on PACER is available to anybody, for free, because the billing threshold (before which there's no charge) is pretty high.
Isn't that basically the same as saying court filings should be available, but not to poor people?
No. Indigent users can already request fee exemptions, and that can be expanded. Access can be provided at courthouses and public libraries. (I don’t know if that is already a practice for PACER specifically, but it should be.)
You can easily burn through hundreds of dollars researching one or two relatively small court cases. I don't think you should be indigent or go to the courthouse/public library to avoid spending hundreds of dollars for that small amount of research.
There's "can't afford" and "can't justify the expense". I'm certainly not poor and at basically no amount above free would I justify the expense. So any cost is completely unacceptable, especially given how much the public pays to produce these results. No more excuses, no more lame justifications, no more hiding.
PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter.
That's about 150 pages of material.
No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.
Agreed. The issue isn't with individuals having access to the data but with aggregation of said data.
Then why do you think they should be public?
I think it should be public to be a general check the public can engage with against judges, cops, and court participants.
Consider cases like Cash for Kids. It potentially could have been caught a lot quicker if we had the data publicly available to see "How does this judge usually rule". Today, proving that a judge has is bias is pretty hard, but imagine if we could see "This judge always denies motions when the claimant or their lawyers are Irish".
Or consider dirty cops. Imagine being able to search all the drug arrests of a cop and finding out "Hmm, this cop is finding meth on everyone he pulls over". That's a valuable tool for the next victim of the cop that gets accused of meth possession. As it currently stands, we basically rely on the cop not forgetting to cover their cameras.
Having more data available makes it easier systematic analysis and mining a whole lot easier.
Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”. That type of information access wasn't even fathomable when the concept of public records was born. It enables a lot of uses where I would argue that the harms outweigh the benefits.
> indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers
Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.
Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to regularly drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.
The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.
The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.
"Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”"
people have already forgotten the lessons of all those mugshots websites.
Yeah, I think this is a bad take on the part of the EFF.
The full dataset will be in private hands and available everywhere to everyone to do anything the moment this goes live.
I protect data for a living, cost asymmetry and proof of work are really the only tools we have.
If this goes live, the next time I get subpoenaed to testify for something I'm going to throw in so many random but couched accusations at people just to screw them over when the data goes live at scale via data brokers and torrent dumps.
Bill Jones (accused in court testimony of killing puppies) is requesting the HOA get off of his back.
I see a valid point here, however, some court rulings create binding precedents. As I understand it, those can be paywalled in PACER. Binding precedents are part of the law everyone within the relevant jurisdiction is required to obey, and it is unjust for any part of the law to not be freely available.
It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.
At least within the federal court system, binding precedent is already freely available. Only circuit courts and SCOTUS can create binding precedent, and the opinions of those courts are freely available on their respective sites, outside of PACER. E.g., here's the 9th circuit: https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/decisions/opinions/
That's good to know. I did not know circuit court opinions were always available.
The current system still doesn't sit right with me. Someone sufficiently wealthy has effectively unlimited access. Someone sufficiently poor with a lot of time on their hands might also have unlimited access. Everyone in the middle has a bottleneck.
In these cases a heavily redacted sentence is made public, and it is common in sensitive cases to keep the names of victims and/or witnesses concealed. Think crimes involving children and such.
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"
what's the problem with everyone knowing how a rep votes? their voting should be a matter of record, not any form of leverage. the dumpsterfire of campaign finance is completely orthogonal (and also both important and simple to solve).
Do you think there is a tradeoff in this case? If so, what is the best counterargument against making PACER records free? I think it's important to note, as the article does, that these records are already "public" (that's what the "P" stands for) what's at issue is whether you should be charged a fee to access them.