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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

Good work by the WaPo for getting to the bottom of this.

This shows an important reason why court proceedings should be openly accessible at scale. Lawyers can spread legal DOS attacks out across jurisdictions, where individual judges would have a hard time discovering the pattern. Allowing citizens to do large scale pattern matching will uncover such things.

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I don't think it's technically the WaPo, because it's posted on a collaborative blog (marked opinion), so it's probably a personal initiative of Volokh (a law professor) and Levy (an attorney). See also http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016... for how it started.

That's where the tip started, but this excellent work wouldn't have happened without the Washington Post funding the blog itself.

Are you sure WaPo is funding them at all, not just hosting? It says here (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/about/...) they are mostly law professors who write for themselves and retain their own editorial control. It used to be an independently hosted blog for a very long time too. That's why I said I think they did it on their own (nothing wrong with that sort of thing).

> We are sharing advertising revenue with the Post, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be much. Our hourly rate for our blogging time will remain pretty pathetic. We’re not in it for the money; if we were, we’d be writing briefs, not blog posts.

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Sounds like this probably would have happened with or without the Post.

Good because WaPo is not a reputable source of information.

They're probably the most reputable & unbiased source of information.

That depends on whether you saw the news about them holding illegal fundraisers or sending all their stories to the DNC for editorial review...

Source?

It's one of the leaked emails:

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699

This site has a copy with more readable formatting:

http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni...

Source please?

See above.

How often do you read it? I recently moved to the DC area so the Post is my daily paper, and while I wouldn't read it if wasn't reputable, I don't think anybody can call it unbiased. It's not just the presidential campaign, they have clear, almost plainly stated bias in lots of areas. I'm fine with that, because it's not hidden and it's not so egregious that they report false stories or something, but the Post should not be your only source of news.

Are you joking? The Washington Post is one of the most left-leaning, biased papers in the country. They're not even subtle about it. Do you honestly not recognize this?

You should consider a career in comedy.

They still need an audience, though. Lots of important information goes undetected because it doesn't have audience reach.

The Post provides them that.

I know, it's not a criticism, I just looked it up because I was curious. I'm happy they're hosted there.

Volokh Conspiracy has been writing long before the Washington Post picked them up

The courts, justice system, and police are horrible by the standards of information access in the 21st century. If you are a victim in an incident, do you know how long it takes to get a copy of the police report? 10 business days. So it's entirely possible that someone who has a hearing for a restraining order, who may not realize that it may be in their interest to have a copy, to be caught flat-footed. And the personal experience of getting it may well be pretty bad as well. The clerk seems to talk to you like you're some scum -- as if you were the perpetrator. (And yes, I was polite, and yes, she knew I was the victim.) The reason for the delay -- they have to redact the private information of the assailant. How in the world does that take them 10 days? On top of all that, they insist that you bring correct change. Also, you will note that there is the typical bureaucratic nonchalance bordering on hostility in the lack of customer service. No attempt at greeting or showing you are noticed or matter in any way. No air of politeness, but even an undertone of contempt -- and that's being perhaps way too charitable. My overwhelming suspicion -- as someone who went to an Ivy League school -- is that I was being treated as "yet another brown person," and that if one of my classmates with a different appearance was present, they would have been treated differently. (Though they still would have had to wait 10 days to get a redacted copy of a sheaf of papers.)

And that's just one example. Such horribleness is all over those systems. I had a hearing get moved 40 miles away -- apparently en-masse because of a computer system change -- with no notification to myself or my lawyer. I didn't even find out about that until we showed up. Sure, the US system is fantastic compared to other places in the world and justice during the middle ages. However, there's still a lot to it that's horrible.

EDIT: The takeaway from this article, my experience, and from many accounts of the justice system in the US, is that it is good on the large contexts of the world and history. However, it's still capable of cruel and arbitrary effects that run drastically counter to reality. Many of these effects come as myriad little "bites" or as if one is fighting a current. And the direction of these effects is strongly influenced by perceived socioeconomic status and race. This is still not up to the point of "good governance."

> My overwhelming suspicion -- as someone who went to an Ivy League school -- is that I was being treated as "yet another brown person,"

Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? It's an old concept: In the eyes of the law, people don't get special treatment depending on their social status.

Did you miss the part where they were treated worse because of their skin color?

Yes, because that part wasn't there, just the parent's unsubstantiated suspicion that racism was the likeliest explanation for an unpleasant experience in dealing with low-level government bureaucrats.

Be more careful in your reading. There is a certain way that people talk to someone they view as considerably inferior. The fact that people working in a place so quickly shift into that mode, even when it's at odds with the facts of the particular situation, is a very strong indicator that some sort of prejudice is at play. Whether or not it's racism, it's certainly not compatible with good governance.

> Yes, because that part wasn't there

Neither was the part where they expected "special treatment depending on their social status." You don't get to dismiss the author's suspicions as imaginary while elevating your own to fact.

My point in including that piece of knowledge, is that I know what it's like when people have all sorts of different ideas about your socioeconomic background. I've been an Ivy brat. I've also been a homeless person. At the time of the events described, I am a well paid societal-normative upper middle class software engineer. I have first hand experience of when people are addressing me as a person of privilege, just another person, or an inferior scumbag. There is a tendency when I'm in the world of the justice/police system, for privileged people to automatically talk to me more like I'm a scumbag than I'm a normative person, but then I'll see the same someone take a different attitude when talking to someone privileged and "white."

So no, I'm not expressing disappointment that I'm not spoken to as a privileged person. I'm just wishing I was spoken to equally as a person.

Unfortunately the law is implemented by regular ol' people who are given quite a bit of discretion.

I think the point is that people also shouldn't get special treatment because of their race, and should be treated courteously regardless of who they are. Poorly phrased on the part of the OP, but one of HN's norms is to apply the Principle of Charity and consider the best interpretation of a comment rather than the worst.

I guess it depends where you live. When I needed a police report for a traffic accident and when my house was burglarized, I dropped by the station and had it in less than 20 minutes.

When you have problems with the "retail" side of government at any level, call your local councilman, alderman, or whatever. If they suck, call the police chief.

That's a desirable goal, but hard to achieve. In the US, courts aren't just an administrative unit of government, like the DMV. They're an independent branch of government, organized as a distributed system. Individual courts have their own jurisdiction and are largely self-managed.

As a result, there isn't really anyone who can tell even all the federal courts, much less the state ones, to all plug into a central electronic filing system. Indeed, even though the federal courts all use the PACER software, each court actually maintains it's own system.

> As a result, there isn't really anyone who can tell even all the federal courts, much less the state ones, to all plug into a central electronic filing system.

Congress can, in fact, do that for federal courts; as for state courts, its true that there is no one body that can, but Congress has been very successful in the past at getting fairly good national compliance with programs that are outside of its ability to mandate by setting rules and providing implementation and maintenance funds to states who choose to follow the rules; there's no reason why this couldn't work with court record systems.

I didn't say it was impossible, just hard to achieve. I think getting an act of Congress (in an area where Congress historically has been loathe to legislate) qualifies.

> I didn't say it was impossible, just hard to achieve.

No, you said there was no one who can do it -- more specifially, you said that, as a result of the organizational structure of the US government, "there isn't really anyone who can tell even all the federal courts, much less the state ones, to all plug into a central electronic filing system."

In point of fact, there is someone who can tell the federal courts to do that, and while they can't actually tell the state courts to, they have a lever that they've been quite adept at using at the past that would likely get at least most state courts to comply were they to choose to.

Now, you can shift to arguing that the entity who could act has a historic lack of will in this area, but that's a very different argument than the absence of an entity with capacity to act.

> No, you said there was no one who can do it -- more specifially, you said that, as a result of the organizational structure of the US government, "there isn't really anyone who can tell even all the federal courts, much less the state ones, to all plug into a central electronic filing system."

I think that's an accurate statement. There is no central administrative authority over the U.S. courts.[1] The chief judges of the courts are responsible for their administration, and the Administrative Office of the Courts serves a policymaking/support role. So there is no "CTO" that can impose a judiciary-wide IT policy like moving to a single electronic filing system. That's why every single court has a different website, runs a different PACER version, etc.

Sure, Congress can exercise its legislative powers to impose such a policy, but it can do lots of things that way.

[1] I don't know what authority Congress Constitutionally has over court administration. Apparently, before reforms in the 1930s, courts were administered through the executive branch.

You can, in fact, search dockets on PACER across jurisdictions. The barrier isn't centralization; the barrier is that it costs $0.10 per page to view documents and search results.[0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/problem-feds-profiting-off-cou...

It was 2008 when Aaron Swartz starting trying to free those public documents. A shame there doesn't seem to have been any progress.

There is work being done on this. Both in terms of access to court opinions (which ought to be free but are often obscured via bureaucracy) and materials for people interested in learning about the law.

https://free.law/ https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener https://www.courtlistener.com/

Disclaimer: While I have no affiliation with this project, I am friends and former roommates of the Free Law Project's Director.

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