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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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