Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says
news.bloomberglaw.com
news.bloomberglaw.com
One of the reasons for PACER fees (and other court costs) is the Judiciary's attempt to have some financial autonomy from Congress, even though it clearly depends on Congress for almost all of its annual budget.
As others have stated, you can get case law for free elsewhere. You do need to access PACER for docket material, however. But there's even a fee exemption for "indigents, pro bono attorneys, academic researchers, and non-profit organizations."[3]
[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance-jud... [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency [3] https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees-work
Granted I don't know exactly what is within their remit, but $8B is a fuck-tonne of money.
Edit: For reference, the UK spends roughly $150 per capita.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098367/justice-spending...
I'm assuming the Ministry of Justice figure is exclusive of prisons. If the figure includes prisons, which cost ~$85/citizen in the U.K.[2] then court system expenditures would be greater in the U.S. (~$90) than the U.K. (~$65).
[1] $2.5b over a population of 39 million. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4097#:~:text=The%2020....
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/298654/united-kingdom-uk...
The budget for the US federal judiciary is bigger than the GDP of 64 countries[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
The population of NYC may well be 5x higher than the combined populations of all of those countries.
Do you have a better example?
A quick google suggests 50k police officers and 33k soldiers - pretty unsurprising.
This is incorrect on both counts. First, the branches are not co-equal by any stretch of the imagination. They are created in order of their intended level of power. The Article I branch, Congress, manifestly has far greater enumerated power than the other branches, including being the only branch with the ability to remove members of the other two branches. The dominant check on Congress's power is really Congress itself, although admittedly the other branches have some ability to curtail abuses of Congressional power. Even so, Congress can overrule both a veto and a finding that a law is unconstitutional. It can also pack the courts, and all kinds of other things. The Article II and II branches, Executive and Judicial respectively, have progressively fewer enumerated powers.
As for the second point, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress and the States the sole power to amend the Constitution, but the Judiciary has arrogated that power to itself. That's not guarding the Constitution, it's mutilating it. Likewise, Congress has ceded much of its authority to the executive.
Anyhow this is all moot because the reality is that how the US Federal Government is run has about as much to do with the Constitution as it does with Schoolhouse Rock[1]. Some of the trappings remain, but that's all. It's observably true that none of the branches is in any way a guardian of the Constitution.
Having said that, obviously, the interpretation often has the effect of amending. But if we’re going to be technical about things, that’s the reality.
But, as I said, the U.S. Federal Government just uses the Constitution as a fig leaf at this point. It would be nice if there were a good reference book on how the country is actually governed from an operational standpoint, including who actually writes bills, how junkets are used, the role of lobbying and blackmail, and so on. I don't imagine such a work will see the light of day until long after the end of this government, but it would be interesting.
That's why people who think Textualism is a check on the judicial power are mistaken, IMO. Notwithstanding that the first and usually only step in traditional statutory interpretation is to apply the text of a statute according to its facial meaning, the underlying principle is to give effect to the intention of the legislature or the purpose of the law. (Most scholars will tell you those--intention vs purpose--are distinct philosophies, but I personally think it's a distinction without a difference.) Textualism doesn't care about intention or purpose and will gladly apply an interpretation that would have seemed absurd to anyone who drafted or voted for the law before the implications (i.e. the insanity of the world) laid bare the ambiguity. And because no self-professed textualist applies this method with perfect consistency (including and, especially IMO, Scalia), expressions of partisan bias can be even greater as the fiction of textualism provides an effective cover, both for the judge and his critics; discretion is disguised because nobody cares when you apply a meaning with which everybody agrees--or at least which seems reasonably consonant with the application of intent or purpose--yet which is nonetheless at odds with the text on its face. Recognizing one's own inconsistencies in this regard, or proving the inconsistencies of others, is far more work than identifying and calling out specific instances of obvious partisanship--especially when the latter are admitted, like during the Warren Court years.
[1] In Western legal philosophy it's usually considered a violation of separation of powers and of justice more generally for a legislature to directly overturn the result of a particular case, as distinguished from changing the law for future cases. Because the buck stops with the courts, of course they get all the flak for disagreeable decisions, and it's convenient to attribute subversive or even malicious motivations. This dynamic is exaggerated in systems with formal stare decisis because the courts effectively only get one bite at the apple. Without stare decisis courts can apply the law differently in different cases, often in response to partisan or popular reactions, which while lowering the stakes and defusing tension has its own obvious problems regarding consistency and discretion. Indeed, even in civil law countries I think there's a direct correlation between the maturity and strength of the judiciary and de facto application of stare decisis--pretense of a lack of discretion. In terms of obeyance to precedent, French or Italian courts are far more consistent than, e.g., Russian courts. Discretion invites corruption. It's no coincidence you never hear stories about how a Russian judicial opinion substantially frustrated the government or legislature. Likewise for Chinese courts, though in the commercial sphere they're far more independent than in Russia, AFAIU. Similar criticisms have been leveled at Japanese courts--e.g. the Supreme Court of Japan has only once or twice overturned a law even though it nominally has the same power as in the U.S. and there's a strong academic consensus it should have done so in many more instances. Though, the peculiarity of Japanese culture makes it difficult to ascribe it to corruption.
This is probably why originalism is more what one hears about these days. One could argue that it's just textualism with the serial numbers filed off in practice, but in theory at least an originalist would reject an absurd interpretation that was obviously counter to original legislative intent. But my cynical side agrees that textualism or originalism is just another tortuous path to reach conclusions that have already been decided on before hand.
> In Western legal philosophy it's usually considered a violation of separation of powers and of justice more generally for a legislature to directly overturn the result of a particular case, as distinguished from changing the law for future cases.
There are various laws passed that granted veteran's benefits to specific individuals. There's also the Palm Sunday Compromise[1]. The latter was certainly politically controversial, and raised criticism along the lines you mention, but it was within Congress's power.
I agree. I think most conservatives tend to identify more with self-styled Originalist scholarship and perspectives. But Scalia made a name for himself academically by coining Original Meaning, which is a twist on strict textualism in the context of constitutional interpretation intended to mitigate the harmful consequences--a legislature can't resolve textual ambiguities in constitutional text as easily as it can statutes. Scalia and others spilled much ink distinguishing Originalism from Original Meaning. At least in terms of scholarship Scalia was consistent that way.
Regarding the Terry Schiavo case (which is a good point, BTW): that the Congress is empowered to do something doesn't mean using that power isn't a violation of general principles of the law. As the Trump years have proved, and which bitter partisanship was already making clear, much of the law as we understand it is normative even in the U.S. And while I think Congress' intervention in the Schiavo case was wrong on almost every level, it's also true that violations of general principles can be used to prevent an injustice. There's often a tension between equity (i.e. fairness) as it regards particular individuals, and the maintenance of general rules and principles. Justice can be a matter of perspective and priorities. That's one reason why courts can and should jealously guard certain discretions (see, e.g., the Michael Flynn, Judge Sullivan Rule 48(a) debate) and independent powers. (EDIT: I realized after the fact that by referencing the Flynn/Sullivan dispute it's ambiguous which discretion I'm referring to--the court's or the government's--but that ambiguity kinda drives home the point regarding the importance and role of discretion. For the record I support Sullivan's position, but it's a very technical debate.) Circling back to Originalism: resolving that tension is one reason behind the emergence and support of so-called Substantive Due Process, which can be construed as the court giving effect to a right (newly discovered or simply never before honored, depending on your perspective) by refusing to give effect to the government's nominal power to violate it--i.e. by procedurally blocking the government. Which is why it's unfair to characterize Substantive Due Process as an oxymoron, at least as it was originally developed by abolitionists at the turn of the 19th century. (Since then courts have been more aggressive at using their equitable powers, which means more than procedurally blocking government actions by, e.g., refusing to hear a prosecution for sodomy or a replevin action regarding an escaped slave, courts affirmatively give effect to a right by enjoining government actions that aren't gated behind a judicial process.)
"Lack of elegance" or "violation of social norms" or similar would (IMO) be a better wording. I see the fact that a united congress is all powerful (can freely amend the constitution, remake the government, etc) as being perfectly in line with (even essential to) the general principles of US law - that the will of the people should rule.
For example: Point to where the US Constitution says you have a right to privacy. Not a right to be free from "unreasonable search and seizure", but a right to be private. It isn't in there. If that means the Founders intended all medical documents to be public, then the Founders were wrong and need to be ignored on this issue; more likely, however, the Founders never felt the need to state the obvious, leaving it to the courts in case it ever came up.
Which it did. Griswold v. Connecticut was decided on the basis of a right to privacy, and that basis is what Roe v. Wade is founded on. Did the Court "amend the Constitution" by deciding that Americans have a right to privacy in medical matters? Was that something it should not have done? Modern morality would say the Court did the right thing, and privacy is an essential human right which any government worthy of the name must recognize.
Congress cannot make administrative law or enforce law.
The Executive cannot appropriate money.
The Judiciary cannot enforce law or make laws.
For example: courts can issue contempt orders against the Executive branch (and many have) but the Executive branch can ignore them (as many have); Congress can pass as many laws as it wants, but unless the executive branch enforces those laws they mean little; the Executive can refuse to appoint/nominate Judges and Justices, nothing Congress or the Judiciary can do about that; and so on.
They could, but it would be kind of pointless (that is, Congress could adopt a statute giving an executive officer a non-discretionary ministerial duty to issue administrative regulation with precisely specified content, but it's just easy to pass a statute law with the same effect. Administrative lawmaking is not an independent power.)
> or enforce law.
What are the offices of Sergeant at Arms of each the House and Senate, if they aren’t law enforcement bodies directly controlled by the respective Houses of Congress?
Congress can remove the Executive.
Two given parties are not "co-equal" when one and only one party can fire the other party.
Oxford dictionary definition of "co-equal":
> equal with one another; having the same rank or importance.[1]
The point of "co-equal branches" is to say that they are separate entities and none is subordinate to the others. The "checks" are only really enforced by norms.
But who decides what is lawful? The judicial branch.
And who carries the guns and has the physical ability to ignore questions of lawfulness? The executive branch.
Each branch has a measure of power over the others.
Also it would be pretty amusing for the Supreme Court to attempt to rule that impeaching a Justice is unlawful. I'd love to see the creative "interpretation" in that ruling.
All of this is of course misleading, because far before this point, we'd have guns blazing civil war. When the government is so deeply untrusting of itself - we're talking a level that makes dems and repubs look like best buddies here - what matters is practical power, not formalities (which is also why the constitutional limits on congressional power are unwise). And let's hope we never have to find out what would happen then, because it's unlikely to be pretty.
Frankly: any limits on congress's power (and specifically the house) are hugely problematic, and contribute to side-stepping democracy in favor of other forms of currying favor. There shouldn't be any question about congress's supremacy; these questions should be fought in the court of public opinion via representative democracy, rather than historical happenstance or legal quirks. It's fine to require some high bar for dramatic changes, but it's not fine to have giants like California, Texas and Florida on the same level as Vermont and Wyoming when it comes to real, impactful issues; and just as critically - it's not OK for the constitution to make it all but impossible in practice to be altered even when a large majority in favor can be found. The current system might require lots of different phases including convincing 75% of states, meaning states with just 4% of the population have a veto, and in those you only need a majority - so, say 3% of the population needed for a veto - and additionally people don't get a say directly, so you also need to run the risk of considerable lobbying; since vested interests generally oppose change - that makes it even harder. The final nail in the coffin of change is partisanship; itself a consequence of flaws in how voting works in the US it would need the kind of constitutional amendments to fix that partisanship makes almost impossible - since anything one side propose is invariable a step too far (or not far enough, or somehow a little in the wrong way) for the other side. Unsurprisingly, there have been virtually no amendments since the very early days that actually affect the way the country is run or democratic rights as opposed to publicly impactful but hot air in terms of power stuff like the prohibition. Voters are captured by a system designed to deal with realities of its day, which is by now almost unrecognizably far away, with no route for permanent improvement.
The exceptional amendment that did pass late and influence actual democratic rights (e.g. women's right to vote) kind of proves the point - because the only reason that passed is because by human biology all states have roughly the same proportion; and political parties find it very difficult to use partisanship against them since they would have been in the vast majority of households regardless of which partisan "team" they adhere to.
Congress cannot overturn a Supreme Court constitutional ruling all by itself. To enact a constitutional amendment, it needs the support of 75% of state legislatures (or, in an alternate procedure only once ever used, separately elected state ratifying conventions). Overturning a Supreme Court ruling by constitutional amendment requires cooperation of the states
(Other indirect schemes for overturning a Supreme Court constitutional ruling also need the cooperation of other parties - court packing, for example, requires cooperation of Congress and the President)
Encouraging agencies to self fund is how you get asset seizures; ticket traps like Maricopa, CA; regulatory capture like the agency that oversaw oilrig safety before the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and many others. It leads to the worst form of monopolistic rent taking.
Suppose you have some litigious plaintiffs filing unmeritorious cases and then losing every case that goes to court but extracting settlements from defendants who do the math and realize it's cheaper to pay them off than to fight and win in court. If you dump a bunch of court fees and other costs on anyone who demands their day in court, more people settle (or the unmeritorous claims can extract higher settlements) and it makes the scam more profitable. Meanwhile the victims aren't a large enough voting block to get it changed on their own, and now the taxpayer isn't feeling the bite of the expense and the judges aren't feeling the wasted time in their courtrooms, even though the number and extent of people being victimized is larger.
And it's the same thing for any of it. By the time the taxpayer is paying most of the cost of operating a subway line, better that usage not be discouraged through fares so that the line sees 90% utilization instead of 60%, because you're paying the fixed costs to run it either way.
Which also makes it so you don't have to waste a lot of money on infrastructure to collect fares, which means that not only are you getting more for your money, the overall cost to the public ends up being lower if it's 100% taxes than if it's 80% taxes and 20% fares, because then half the fares aren't being wasted on fare collection.
If the government is going to pay for something then it should pay for all of it or not at all.
Meanwhile, prosecutors don’t pay and have nationwide access.
It’s fair of course. Completely. The Rule of law™.
Given they never bothered to fix that bug, I guess they were raking it in.
There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company.
In the USA it would absolutely be legal and you would be bound by a binding arbitration clause and a non-disclosure + non-disparagement clause.
You might even be bound by a license / ToS which prevents you from comparing the capabilities of that system against a better system[1].
[1] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...
Most providers bury this cost in their revenue model and hide it from users. While PACER is probably charging more than is necessary, they’re definitely not burying it, and I’m honestly quite happy to see that.
There is an interesting parallel in that common and widespread reaction that match issues we’ve seen with essential workers during the pandemic, where for example a customer will say “Why should I wear a mask? There’s no one in here!”, somehow failing to recognize the worker as a human being in the process.
So, to translate the PACER pricing objection into the human equivalent, I present a question:
Do human librarians deserve to be paid a wage for performing a search that finds no results, or should their wages be docked if they can’t find anything?
Or think of it this way... how often would you go to a library or bookstore that charged you simply for looking around (additional charges apply for each aisle you walk down)?
The entire economic system of the Internet is built on the fact that the marginal cost of every action is essentially $0. It's certainly no where remotely close to 10 cents. More like 10 millionths of a cent.
Reminds me of the pre-internet days, when online access was charged by the minute. You'd better be damned sure you knew exactly what you were looking for before you connected to CompuServe, The Source, Delphi, or whatever.
I think today, people don't grok what a miracle it is that in many circumstances they can just aimlessly "surf" the internet and not get any incremental charges.
Keep it under $30/quarter and PACER waives the fees.
Anyone else could setup a pacer alternative and just pay for the docs once. I think some legal services even do that.
PACER also includes documents filed by the parties to cases, which don't have the same cut-and-dried nature. A fair use argument probably goes a long way here but that's always more uncertain.
Edit: Also, have you considered going through YC’s non profit pipeline, if only for access to their network and partner resources?
> Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs. Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily. Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers.
My hope is that one day everything in PACER has been retrieved out for storage in the Internet Archive, and the ongoing costs for keeping the collection up to date are trivial. The user fee waiver per quarter has been raised to $30; please consider using RECAP if you're a PACER user!
The purpose of the fees is to cover the costs incurred by the court system in managing the document system so that it's self-funding rather than being paid out of the government's general revenue. In other words, while the costs required for publishing any particular document are miniscule, the point is to provide revenue for the court system.
I'm not defending it, but that's the reason the costs are so high and why the system still exists. To get rid of the PACER fees you need to convince Republican congressmen to "subsidize" the court system.
For funsies, let's assume the entire PACER corpus is 10TB (edit: appears to be closer to 250-300 TB). Let's also assume that you want all of it OCRd, indexed, and available over a web interface and an API. Let's also assume a staff of ~5 technologists to oversee such a system. What do you think a reasonable annual budget would be for such a system? I would argue no more than $2-3 million. Let's Encrypt (non-profit for public certs) has a budget of $3.6 million and employees 13 people (as of 2019).
Perhaps the judiciary should just pay Free Law Project to host PACER, they’ve already proven they can provide a superior product cost effectively.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46334... (Free Law Project, 2018 990-EZ, Line 17, total expenses)
https://free.law/2016/10/10/the-cost-of-pacer-data-around-on...
It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...
Years ago, at a revenue funded program in a non-Federal setting, one of our roles was furnishing the organization. They would use a 5 year depreciation cycle and move groups of people every few years, leaving depreciated office furniture behind and buying new/newer stuff at the new office.
You could trace the movement by color selections. The orange and vomit green legacy of the 1970s was replaced by pottery barn colors from a swatch that one of the big shots kept in her desk. Furniture was used midrange commercial stuff instead of WW2 (literally) surplus desks and prison chairs. They would add little touches like getting posters and artwork from regional tourism groups and leftover event posters from local festivals to decorate. (Typically for free)
[1] https://free.law/2016/11/14/how-much-money-does-pacer-make/
[2] https://free.law/2016/10/10/the-cost-of-pacer-data-around-on...
I signed up just to see if I could pull dockets on publically traded companies, so I'd know if there'd be litigation before others and get an edge in trading.
It was about 2 hours of using the system before I realized this would be impossible (you know, on my personal budget.) I think I made like under 10 searches and racked up over a dollar in fees. Some of the pages actually charge you per search result not even search. So if you query a term and you get 100 results, that's 100 charges.
I feel like using PACER data to inform stock trading signals is a pretty niche use case... For "regular people" that have a connection with a few cases, I think it should be free, and it was in my experience.
Notably, the information is free up to a certain threshold.
Hm? FOIA requests are usually made to request the release of data which is not yet available to the public. Most such requests require some level of human intervention, e.g. to determine what sorts of records need to be searched, to perform manual searches on non-digitized or poorly indexed data, and to perform any necessary redaction on the retrieved data.
PACER, by contrast, is already fully automated. The court records it searches are all already digitized, and have all been cleared for release; literally the only thing which users are paying for is the operation of the service.
I'd say in this way they're relatively analogous, though you're partially correct in pointing out some of the differences.
The sad reality is that if someone was accused of something and later recused, many casual observers will fail to double click through everything to uncover that the defendant was cleared of any wrong doing. Even worse, many people settle whilst innocent as the cost of litigation exceeds settlement requests—-therefore even if someone did double click to learn the outcome, their reputation is tarnished nonetheless.
I hate paying the pacer fees, but if it creates a barrier to people misusing (which I am 100% certain will happen) what they find, then the Pacer fees are in fact a good thing. Put bluntly, unlocking Pacer to be free for all will have a devastating effect on minorities who have been racially targeted by bad actors in the past.
Opinions and orders are available for free from government sources. Also, important motions and other filings are usually made available too.
It costs money to run PACER, so fees are required, like for many government services. The issue here is that the collected fees were higher than needed, providing a slush fund that did not require congressional appropriation.
Similarly, the USPTO is self-funded by user fees that are over priced. The excess fees provide a slush fund for congress.
Where are opinions and order available?
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of who makes up the 25%.
If there was a compelling public interest in serving those users in the 25% then, theoretically, the parties in each case could make their filings publicly available; the parties have access to free copies of the filings in their case.
The reasons why parties would not want to do that -- which I trust the reader can imagine -- probably explains part of the historical reluctance to make unlimited PACER use free for everyone.
As Amercians' privacy is decimated by tech companies, the moderate amount of "privacy" afforded to parties in federal courts might actually be something worth protecting.
What is filed in federal courts is perhaps one area of people's lives that is not readily available for tech companies to vacumm up on a mass scale. Needless to say, filings routinely contain sensitive personal information.
Note I am not making an argument either way, but just presenting some points to consider.
It (and this is a stretch) essentially disenfranchises poorer members of society by limiting their access to justice and information.
Not sure how that can help poorer members of society, since most people are quite unlikely to be doing their own case law research anyway.
PACER is useful for seeing submissions from parties or the court that occur in pending cases.
Usually this stuff is of little interest or use to normal people.
I'm not talking about opinions, I'm talking about case outcomes, involved parties, lawyers, judge info, terminated parties, dates, docket info, context, complaints. And furthermore, I'm not talking about individual cases. The interest for "normal" people largely comes from the aggregate of PACER records, with analysis done on top of that. In other words - because we can't get aggregate records of court information, we can't run analysis that would be interesting or useful for understanding what's happening. Surely you can see how this data could inform the US in understanding how the law is applied throughout. If not, I'll gladly type up a list of 50 kinds of analysis that would be interesting to normal people.
The people who would run this analysis are technical journalists with backgrounds in court data.
An example of a project that uses PACER information whose bills are in the thousands because of the high PACER costs: https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-miscondu...
This is not feasible in a time where freelance journalists have to do preliminary research before even writing a pitch.
That's frequently the only way the poor can pursue justice. Pro se representation is a thing; sometimes they even win.
But aside from that, without knowing what courts are doing, there is no way to assure they're acting in the public interest. The public must be able to inspect the work output of the courts if a free society is to stay free.
Legal opinions are free, for pro-se case law research: https://scholar.google.com/ etc. You need access to the filings to see if someone got screwed.
I use the filings in notable cases to help me figure out what I need to say in my own case. The State University's law school library has free access to Westlaw, and other resources (law journals, etc).
> That's frequently the only way the poor can pursue justice. Pro se representation is a thing;
The Federal Judicial Center has a report on helping the federal courts deal with unrepresented parties [2]. My local district court has a free attorney program for people like me who can't afford an attorney. My last free consultation, the attorney suggested I had a case of 'fraud on the court', which is when you get screwed by your opponent playing dirty.
Almost five years ago I'd petitioned the state court pro-se for a writ habeas corpus, on behalf of my friend, the day after I found the term mentioned in the state statutes: "habeas corpus [0]? oh how useful". The judge seemed impressed that she was able to rule in my favor. On returning to the hospital with my granted court order, I was attacked by the security guards and was charged with misdemeanors (the one hospital security guard got unhinged when I took his picture to document the situation).
> sometimes they even win.
My defense attorney was impressed with my granted pro-se habeas petition. He said he knows attorneys who couldn't do what I did as a rookie pro-se filer.
My subsequent filings have all been fine, but the various judges have found ways to avoid having to deal with them. The first judge misquoted the wording of state statutes to make my petition go away. The state court of appeals recruited one of their retired judges to dismiss my appeal. The state supreme court dismissed without comment.
Federal judges are supposedly better than state judges, on account of the lifetime appointments. I think the district court judge who had to deal with me didn't want to, so he just ignored the inconvenient parts of the case law. The court of appeals also got rid of my appeals, without addressing my contentions. Hrmph. I recently figured out how to get a new judge [1].
> But aside from that, without knowing what courts are doing, there is no way to assure they're acting in the public interest. The public must be able to inspect the work output of the courts if a free society is to stay free.
This is well said. My district court filings are all public, even though they ought to at least be anonymized (like was done in Roe v. Wade, for example). I've come to appreciate that my asking to file under seal gave the court of appeals judges and supreme court justices a convenient 'out' that allows them to avoid having to deal with me. My predicament is that don't want to give advanced notice to the perpetrators who ought to be prosecuted.
As far as these pacer fees: I'm glad my filings haven't been siphoned into courtlistener.com yet, as that means they can still be sealed...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
[1] 28 U.S. Code § 144.Bias or prejudice of judge -- https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/144
[2] https://www.fjc.gov/sites/default/files/2017/Pro_Se_Case_Man...
Though PACER is good for looking at submitted papers to see how other lawyers draft their complaints, motions, etc.
I wish that every country published their court documents for free.
Not that PACER isn’t overcharging, just that it isn’t where lawyers go to get opinions, which are critically important for the practice of law.
On a related note, I would think that it would violate Due Process if any piece of information relevant to any case, legal or otherwise, were available and not provided, that is, if there was some sort of barrier (monetary, legal, or otherwise) preventing its easy and complete acquisition by the public, or whoever was involved in a case and needed it...
This feels a lot like scientific papers that are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and then yet again charged to taxpayers to access them.