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Comment by esbranson | Hacker News Reader

If you're trying to fix anything relating to public policy, politics, &c., without fixing this you are wasting your time. You will make a bigger difference adopting a local stretch of highway and picking up litter. It is maddening to see generation after generation learn this the hard way.

FLP's CourtListener RECAP hits hard, but it has no counterparts either worldwide or within the US. If it goes offline, democracy and rule of law across the entire world go offline with it. Federal statutes and regulations are a very small part of black letter law.

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There is little worse action you can take than discouraging others from doing anything.

Far worse problems than PACER have been solved. Just because you've been unsuccessful doesn't necessarily mean others will be.

PACER is currently a "lesser concern" because of FLP, compared to state court dockets in backwards states like California and New York (affecting some 60 million people alone), though by no means solved.

And if by discouraging you mean encouraging people to adopt freeways and pick up litter, I definitely intended to set expectations about how much might be achieved without addressing fundamental free law movement issues.

We do need help on Wikipedia though, but that is more ancillary and general.

No counterparts worldwide? Here in Australia, all significant case law has been published on AustLII, which is freely accessible and searchable, since about 2000. I think CanLII and NZLII are equally comprehensive. Government law publishers provide free and authoritative access to all statutes. Lexis and Westlaw still make money by publishing commentary and summaries, but paywalled primary sources are an American problem.

AustLII, CanLII and NZLII are all clones of the original Legal Information Institute (LII) from Cornell University. [0]

Most Australian courts require or prefer that case law be cited using exact page numbers from the 'authorised reports', i.e. the ones published by Westlaw or LexisNexis.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu

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