Today’s posting is one of a four-part series on PACER provided by G. Thomas Sandbach, Esq, owner of Justice Technology Consulting. Tom’s contact information appears at the end of the post.

In the distant past (say 5 or 10 years ago), if you wanted to to view a court case file, you were forced to trek down to the courthouse and sift through sometimes handwritten docket books and paper files to find your neighbor’s involvement in the justice system. The policy applied equally to an attorney who represented the plaintiff as well as a nosy neighbor who wanted to snoop on a defendant. This “practical obscurity” protected you, that quirky woman down the street and sometimes even your city councilman from having their judicial business aired extensively in public.

In 2001 When the Judicial Conference of the United States made Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) available on the Internet, United States court records became became available to anyone with a credit card and access to a computer. PACER provides electronic access to dockets, case records, pleadings and other documents from more than 200 federal courts.

At $.08 a page with a maximum charge of $2.40 per document, the fees are fairly modest when compared to the commercial providers of court documents. The published PACER fee schedule indicates that the fees are “necessary to reimburse expenses incurred by the judiciary in providing electronic public access to court records.” While the price of a single document is fairly reasonable, downloading documents by the millions becomes highly prohibitive. The fees also provide what some have called a “paywall” that maintains some measure of practical obscurity preventing most court documents from being widely available to the general public.

While, pursuant to the The E-Government Act of 2002, PACER “may, to the extent necessary” charge for document access, Senator Joseph Lieberman asserted this year that “the funds generated by these fees are still well higher than the cost of dissemination, as the Judiciary Information Technology Fund had a surplus of approximately $150 million in FY2006.”

The Free PACER Movement

Those who believe that access to PACER should be free argue:

• The PACER system was built and is operated at government expense.
• It houses documents that are a matter of public record.
• Historically viewing these records in the courthouse resulted in no cost to members of the public.

For these reasons, shortly after the PACER roll-out came the inevitable calls for the system to be available for free. The information superhighway infrastructure, together with the “information wants to be free” ethos envisioned the prospect of getting virtually any document ever filed in any court any time and at any place without a fee. A PACER free of any document retrieval cost could provide the means to achieve that end with regard to U.S. Courts.

In April of 2006 the American Association of Law Libraries urged that PACER be made “available at no cost to users of federal depository libraries.” In response to these calls for a free PACER system, in November 2007 the Administrative Office of the United States Courts made PACER available a 17 federal depository libraries for free in a scheduled 2 year pilot program. You would expect that we would be getting a report on the results of that program any time now – except that it was abruptly and indefinitely suspended in September 2008.

Next: Free PACER? - Sinking the Pilot

Photo Credit = Pacer

NOTE: The views expressed in this posting are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the position of Justice Served.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Court Management, Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.