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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. For my purpose as a reader it is editorial incompetence that the article neither provided that link, nor the name of the case to make it easy to lookup.

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This is my gripe with regular news. Science paper? No link. New law bill? No link. Someone made an hour-long speech? 30 second cut, no link to the full speech. Is it almost as if they'd rather we didn't see their sources?

All of those things take you away from their platforms. They don't want you to leave, period.

At least it is for SCOTUS decisions to find the decision quickly (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/23 has a list of all opinions from the current time, updated live as they are announced).

It's really painful when you've got coverage of state court cases where you have neither the case name nor the court it was filed in nor the docket nor any document nor anything that would let you figure any of this out.

Yeah SCOTUS is pretty good about putting their decisions out there. Sometimes too good at it ;)

as a non US-person who recently wanted to look at some cases: is there a free way to do this? Or do you have to sign up to the weird ePACER?

You do not have to sign up for anything. SCOTUS opinions are freely-accessible public record.[0]

[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/opinions.aspx

Every document at SCOTUS level is freely available, although you have to know the docket number to get all of the briefs correctly. SCOTUSblog in practice is a more accessible interface to the docket, since you can easily look up by case name: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/terms/ot2023/, e.g., the full docket for the case in this article is here: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/harrington-v-pur...

If you want to deal with non-SCOTUS federal cases, your choices are to use PACER or to use RECAP (https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/), where the documents may be available. E.g., the appeals court docket for this case is at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67448481/in-re-purdue-p..., note that many documents aren't available because no one made it free via RECAP.

If you want to deal with state courts... good luck! Every state has a different system with different level of pains to track down.

For SCOTUS related news I always hit up SCOTUSblog:

https://www.scotusblog.com/

They do a good job of linking to or posting quality articles.

A more cynical take is that it isn't editorial incompetence, it's an editorial decision. Once you notice it, it's hard not to notice how often you aren't given the sources or ways to further confirm stories, especially those that might be controversial.

Deliberate. Someone makes more money as a result.

This is why I so often just go to the AP and look for their article - https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-opioi...

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811187.)

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