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joncrane

I've been trying to look at the court filings over the lawsuit to extend Census data collection.

I got 3/4 of the way through registering for PACER before I gave up.

Apparently it's 10 cents per page, and if you incur less than $3 of charges in a quarter, you won't be billed.

But you still have to provide your credit card to get access.

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Here's the docket for that case on the recap archive btw. As is typical for high profile cases it looks to have basically every interesting document available (for free) except for transcripts.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17454475/national-urban...

Thank you!

You can get most of the documents for popular cases from RECAP (mentioned in this story). RECAP has a browser extension that harvests documents when people pay for them with their own PACER accounts, and reposts them to their service [0]. A federal judge rejected the State of Washington's motion for a temporary restraining order (in a lawsuit regarding CHAZ). I was interested in the filings, so I used my PACER account to download them. Then I checked RECAP, and found they were there already.

I don't think PACER requires a credit card -- my account is set up to bill me if I incur more charges than the complimentary $30/quarter.

I used my PACER account to file in the Court of Appeals. It was very convenient, much easier than mailing a big envelope to their filing clerk. Attorneys are required to file in the federal courts electronically with text-searchable PDFs. Pro Se (without an attorney) filers have to ask the district court for permission to file electronically, but the Court of Appeals didn't have that bar to filing electronically.

tl/dr: if you're going to file Pro-Se in federal court (bankruptcy/civil/etc), get a PACER account and sign up for electronic notification of filings.

[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ and https://free.law/

Perhaps I missed a zero, is the threshold for billing 30 or 3 dollars per quarter? (I guess viewing 30 filings vs 300?)

Also I definitely gave up at the point they asked for a CC (which I didn't have handy at the time). The UX certainly led me to believe this was a required step; are you saying I could skip that step?

If so, is the idea that you could theoretically rack up a lot of charges in one quarter before they cut you off for non-payment? Seems like an easy way to game the system...just sign up for a new account every quarter.

The billing threshold was formerly $15/quarter; now it's $30. I don't have a CC stored on my account, and have never hit the threshold for them to mail/email me a bill. I think they asked for a CC, but I saw the option for 'just bill me and I'll send a check'.

> Seems like an easy way to game the system...just sign up for a new account every quarter.

As I recall, they mailed me something via the USPS before my account was activated. I don't think it'd be very smart to intentionally rack up charges with the branch of government responsible for putting people in cages, and think you could just walk away from those charges.

PACER's UX is pretty bad.

Convincing organisations that their UX is pretty bad is...hard.

> Convincing organisations that their UX is pretty bad is...hard.

I think it depends on whom at the organisation you try to convince. I think that it's probably true that a lot of organisations are perfectly aware that their UX is pretty bad, but they (as a collective) have spent so much time learning to deal with the ways that it's bad that they don't see it as that bad.

So I think that the real problem is convincing an organisation that their UX is bad enough to justify ripping it out and replacing it with a new UX, that will (statistically speaking) also be bad, but now different and unfamiliar.

The additional problem is that organizations with bad UX frequently have a UX designed around the structure of the organization.

When this happens, the UX is convenient for each part of the organization, and if they rebuild it they will naturally be tempted to rebuild it the same way. Everyone may know that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, but doing anything else requires fighting uphill against politics.

Especially government organizations who have a monopoly on the access or functionality the interface provides.

UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) team has a different approach. In 2014 they undertook a redesign of all UK government sites with an emphasis on being usable for everyone. At the time it was controversial (see el reg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067984) but it's been widely lauded since.