Court Records Should Be Free
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In the municipality where I live, we're statutorily required to replace lead service lines[†] within the next 5-10 years (I forget how many). The municipality replaces the trunk lines, and homeowners are required to replace the last hop at their own (significant) expense.
Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this.
But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own.
A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession.
That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses.
I don't know, things are complicated.
[†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.
The municipality could service all the homes and pay for it with taxes, probably using their own people or a negotiated contract.
The private (and usually no -savvy) individual has much less negotiating power and is going to get taken to the cleaners by a plumber. Three houses in a street are likely to have 3 different plumbers on 3 different dates.
It’s just like that the cost per square foot to pave a single driveway vs the entire sidewalk or foundations for a whole neighborhood.
The prerequisite here, however, is that it's actually a competitive market. Two suppliers colluding or mirroring each other doesn't count.
If this were the government telling everyone to buy landscaping services or something else that's not intentionally supply constrained by the government to benefit incumbent you'd have an argument.
Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).
> no matter how much effort the client site makes
I doubt solar provides stable predictable current 24/7 with warranty amd penalties. That is the hard part, and what it takes to be "high quality".
State sized grid is not a joke.
agree, state grid is no joke
People sometimes try to measure things like "overhead" but that also doesn't really work. If one entity pays $10M in claims but half of them are unknowingly fraudulent and another spends $1M to prevent the fraud, the first one is paying $10M with 0% overhead for fraud detection while the other is paying $5M with 20% overhead for fraud detection. Comparing the percentages implies the second one has "higher overhead" but it's also the one paying $6M instead of $10M.
And the same thing bleeds into the prices for specific services. A provider will happily give you a "20% discount" on the price if you don't bother to check that half their claims are fake. Then you're actually paying them 60% more while the books show them charging you 20% less per procedure.
On top of that, the market for many medical services in the US is extremely captured. The majority of states still have Certificate of Need laws, which are literally laws prohibiting new providers from entering the market if the local government (i.e. the incumbents) think the result would be "too much" competition. The AMA consistently lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage, and doctors who immigrate from other countries, even licensed physicians in countries with first rate healthcare and medical education systems, can't practice in the US without doing a US residency, which in turn consumes one of the residency slots and prevents immigration from alleviating the shortage whatsoever.
The premise is that competitive markets result in lower prices, not that uncompetitive markets do.
Anyway, I think parent comment to yours is using single-payer in the sense that implies universal healthcare [2].
[1] https://www.kff.org/medicare/how-medicare-pays-medicare-adva...
The first is that it doesn't actually get you out of the monopoly. If there is an uncompetitive market and you're required by law (or otherwise compelled) to purchase their services, making the buyer a monopsony still doesn't give them any leverage because they have to contract for the services even if the provider won't lower the price, and the provider knows that.
The second is that the purchasing bureaucracy then becomes a target for capture and has all the wrong incentives to resist it. They control a trillion dollars in purchasing power but it's really about a million providers getting an average of a million dollars each. That's the recipe for doing something inefficient a million times over because every provider wants to get $2M instead of $500k and will lobby for regulations or offer kickbacks or commit fraud to get it, and the public doesn't have the bandwidth to apprehend a million individual cases of things going crooked when each one is only 0.0001% of the total. And meanwhile "a million providers" still doesn't imply there is real competition to get you out of (1), because a radiology lab in Philadelphia isn't a substitute for a neurologist in Denver or vice versa.
The third is that you still don't have any sensible pricing mechanism. Even if you have a monopsony, how do they come up with a price to offer? Dart board? Demanding to look at the supplier's accounts, thereby giving the supplier an incentive to waste money because they're getting cost plus? The only real way to give them the incentive to do it for less if they can is to have alternate suppliers so that they each lose the contract if they don't offer the best price, but not having that was the original problem that "collective bargaining" was supposed to address.
Whereas if you instead focus on sustaining a competitive market then "collective bargaining" is just wasteful overhead, because the competition is already keeping margins thin so there is little more to extract from the supplier and you're only unnecessarily subjecting yourself to a layer of indirection and the principal-agent problem.
1) You get elected by convincing voters to vote for you. Which is not the same as actually getting the lowest prices.
2) Core competency has been stamped out of a lot of government agencies and so if you're a skill negotiator you want to be collecting the commission from the sales contract to the government as opposed to a low salary from being the government agent.
So at the end of the day, making all these contracts public wouldn't fix future ones from being issued. Although I'm still for more sunshine.
For example, journalists. There's enormous investigative journalism value in the documents that have been filed in court. People say all sorts of shit in affidavits which turns out to be relevant outside the context they intended it for. PACER should be free, if nothing else than for the public interest value of its content (outside as well as inside the court).
Making PACER entirely free is regressive, absent some new scheme to single out the lawyers (like a dedicated lawyer tax or something, which runs into constitutional problems.)
Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.
PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth.
The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.
I don't know about that; I've used PACER a fair amount, despite also using Westlaw.
So I'm not familiar with this area at all, but aren't only the major rulings annotated? Based off of this sibling comment [0] (which I have no idea is correct or not), PACER is mainly used for exhibits, briefs, and motions, and I wouldn't expect for LexisNexis and Westlaw to annotate these.
I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.
but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses
(per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/)
courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy
> I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...
Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)
> The judiciary opposes measures that shift the costs of providing access to PACER to litigants filing cases in federal courts, unduly hindering access to justice
That's their response to the open courts act of 2021, which would have made pacer free.
As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a better cheaper equivalent than what exists, even including the submission systems. (With the caveat that I have used state court e-file systems but only briefly touched the federal ones).
If pacer revenue is paying the filing clerks, I probably feel differently; clerks are necessary components of the system who cannot be replaced by technology today.
* Sports gambling excise tax: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax
* Indoor tanning services: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
WestLaw is expressive. It's tricky to do targeted taxes on expressive organizations. Pesky First Amendment.
The big reason nothing like this is going to happen is that there are like 40 nerds in the country that care about it, and then a huge majority of the population that is reasonably well served by the current compromise.
One of those protectionist policies is charging for PACER itself.
The costs of running PACER are absolutely trivial in comparison to the costs of running the judiciary. To the point that even bringing the point up is disingenuous to the point that it discredits everything else you say.
Case law is law. People are required to obey the law. They should be able to access the law so they can know how to follow it. It's that simple.
You would really enjoy reading Chief Justice Roberts' end of 2023 State of the US Federal Courts paper [†][ <6 pages ]. He discusses how their system has always been antiquated, resistant to change... but how significantly LLMs are going to change commoners' (like us!) access to the judicial system.
There are also many humorous musings about past Justices' hatred of new technology, and that ~"if some former Justices could they'd have gotten rid of most associates, too; but they were still technologically necessary"~.
[†] <https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...>
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My own forty-something brother is currently a state-level judge, and he still uses a typewriter, by choice, for more-privileged correspondence.
State of our times, l-onestar.
Yes everything costs money. But we expect that the government would provide services for the greater good of its citizens.
I can step foot in some of the greatest museums in the world for free in downtown dc. As a citizen I can get (and have) a reading card for the Library of Congress. For free. Are these services being provided by volunteers? No. My tax dollars pay for it. So should it fund electronic record keeping for legal proceedings.
I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: RECAP, and a free tier. If it's me, what you do is jack the free tier up from $30 to $1000.
You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms.
Now if that cost were to go to zero- no I don’t think the lawyers will charge less. But I do think that even the presence of a paywall reinforces the perceived scarcity of the legal profession. My thought is that if these documents were available more freely, we would see more democratization of the legal system.
For example, small claims doesn’t require legal representation. But knowing previous case law could definitely help even a lay person prepare a case.
This line of reasoning devolves into pure power politics. If we assume costs would always be passed down, all public taxation policy will always land at the feet of the hungry, the only people who are unable to pass on the cost. For any taxation or redistribution policy to make sense, we must agree that some amount of the cost will manifest as lower demand or slimmer margins. Some of the cost must be born by the law firm.
> My thought is that if these documents were available more freely, we would see more democratization of the legal system.
Does that actually make sense? My understanding of the legal profession and the game theory around it, is that it's a supply side constrained system. If you're being charged, and might go to jail should you fail to defend yourself, you're going to hire the absolutely most expensive lawyer you can get your hands on. It doesn't really matter if you could defend yourself, it's just not worth the risk.
I gave the example of museums and libraries which I assume we all agree are public goods and worth funding with tax dollars. In your example with criminal justice, we fund public defenders as well.
Knowledge as a whole is a supply side constrained system (maybe changing with llms??). As we have experienced, parents are more than willing to pay any price to send their kids to the most expensive (exclusive) college they can afford, to include going into debt. Yet we still find it useful as a society to fund public school and libraries so we can democratize knowledge to those with the interest to do so.
I think it’s been quite obvious for the past twenty years that any additional cost ultimately is passed to the customer. In the early 2000s the “fuel surcharges” started slipping in. Then telco companies started adding on fees for any compliance regime they were subject to. And so on it goes.
Free PACER access might actually help average people get better legal representation by reducing the cost burden on the small independent attorneys who don’t mingle with execs and politicians at the country club.
Which is what we arguably have already considering the state of public defenders, jail, bail system, and how often the rich get off scot free for their crimes.
In 2026, this is similar to having secret laws, as your LLM might not have a subscription or know to tell you to get one
Fiscally? Sure. In terms of liberty? Absolutely not. We are talking about public access to law, which is foundational to a free society.
Federal courts are not strictly limited by tax revenue in the same way that state courts are, and I am more sympathetic to this line of argument on the state level. Finding replacement revenue is a legitimate concern, but a secondary one due to the federal government's deficit spending privilege.
This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.
Buuuut, that doesn't accomplish the secondary goal of incentivizing the departure of black grandma who has crappy landscaping or car part out guy or whoever else owns their own house and won't be kicked by rent but whose means and standard of living are below the vision of some snooty Chicago suburb. There's always that undertone to these sorts of things.
And if it's not that there's some local business connections that are angling for things to be structured a given way. The dirt work guy with a cousin on the board would much rather see the town force people to incur thousands of $5k jobs that he'll surely get a cut of rather than have to bid a single contract with the same or less profit that he will not necessarily win.
PACER (mostly, of course they don't want to give the public a tour of the sausage factory) isn't juggling 2nd and 3rd tier goals that are so objectionable they can't be talked about like your municipality is.
And frankly I think PACER should be free specifically to enable bulk access so that all sorts of parties can sift through it, present the data, fact check against it, perform meta analysis, etc, etc.
So yeah, I think that cost should be split among the entire municipality.
I find it interesting that you have such a libertarian viewpoint on the one... But not the other. Is this not a direct government monopoly?
Which is a major difference between that and PACER, since they're serving text and the marginal cost of more people having access to it is essentially zero.
If you make the homeowners pay for the service line replacement, the number of service lines that will be replaced is the same. If you make the public pay for access to the law, this happens:
> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces.
...because everyone else is priced out by the fees, or even just the friction of having to configure payments for someone who is only going to use it infrequently. Which means the general public loses out on having access to something it would have a negligible marginal cost to give them.
Imagine, for example, an open source project to search or otherwise process court opinions, which then needs access to all of them. If the government is charging per page, that's completely infeasible. If there is a public torrent of all the opinions, people get to do interesting things they currently can't. And this is not just public information but legal precedent that everyone is expected to comply with -- and yet is being charged to even read it.
Also, this isn't right even for the service lines:
> In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own.
As a minor point, municipalities get their revenue predominantly from property tax, which is collected from property owners.
The main issue is that the outlay is a fixed cost. The cost of replacing the service line will generally be similar for a $200k house as for a $2M house. Meanwhile taxes are collected in proportion to property value or income. If you tax everyone by even a flat X percent in order to give everyone a flat Y dollar amount benefit, the result is a progressive effective rate curve, because everyone gets e.g. a $10,000 benefit but a lower income person is paying $2500 in tax while a higher income person is paying $25,000, making the lower income person's net transfers to the government not just low but negative.
This goes back to Hammurabi. These decisions are the law. We pay tax dollars to create all this and even if we didn’t, if we’re held to these rulings we need to be able to read them.
Someone got sued for copyright infringement for giving away a copy of the statues, but they ultimately won.
See e.g., Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (2020) & Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l (5th Cir. 2002).
I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10.
Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.
Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!
I think RECAP rules a lot and I have the plugins enabled in the browser session I use to read PACER. I'm just saying, it's not really a liberation of all of PACER.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
They're publicly available in a byzantine system maintained by the Court Management, a governmental entity (Net Hamishpat, "court net" - slightly deviating from Beit Hamishpat meaning "the court", https://www.court.gov.il/NGCS.Web.Site/HomePage.aspx), but it is not where cases and material are referenced from in the public sphere or legal docs.
Most professionals subscribe to Nevo (https://www.nevo.co.il/), which is a "repository" of cases, law (updated to the latest revisions) etc. Even official court documents say "as seen in Nevo". They sometimes release tidbits of info to the common (unregistered) man, but searches etc are paywalled. There are other similar systems from other companies.
It seems that Nevo and co are slurping the material via a sliding-window (~7 days back) doc-dump that the Court Management lets people access as long as they commit to removing cases that the Court Management tells them to remove.
There is one renegade (Tola'at Hamishpat, "court worm" https://xn----8hcborozt8bdd.xn--9dbq2a/) which is not using this doc-dump and instead scrapes the gov website. They're doing it to not be bound by the agreement for removing documents, which they say they'll only do if they get forwarded a court order that the case is now classified. This is because the Court Management, which is not populated by judges but rather admin people, sometimes instructs removal of cases too freely (without a court order), which clouds the principle of public availability according to the Tola'at operators.
There are other sites which purport to allow free access to cases, but they're usually low-level scrapers and don't allow a full-enough view.
As an "information wants to be free" person, I find this entire saga fascinating.
Article about Tola'at people (Hebrew): https://www.themarker.com/weekend/2025-12-26/ty-article-maga...
It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.
That's about 150 pages of material.
I have definitely gone over the limit for single documents in the past, although I've never been over the quarterly waiver limit. Judicial opinions and hearing trancripts often exceed 30 pages.
Consider cases like Cash for Kids. It potentially could have been caught a lot quicker if we had the data publicly available to see "How does this judge usually rule". Today, proving that a judge has is bias is pretty hard, but imagine if we could see "This judge always denies motions when the claimant or their lawyers are Irish".
Or consider dirty cops. Imagine being able to search all the drug arrests of a cop and finding out "Hmm, this cop is finding meth on everyone he pulls over". That's a valuable tool for the next victim of the cop that gets accused of meth possession. As it currently stands, we basically rely on the cop not forgetting to cover their cameras.
Having more data available makes it easier systematic analysis and mining a whole lot easier.
And for non-common law jurisdictions, even the UK level of publicity of judgments is rarely available - anonymisation is a prerequisite: https://homoki.net/en/2024/02/01/On_Anonymisation_of_court_d...
So, for many countries, it's not just that sealed documents are not accessible, many people in traditional democracies couldn't imagine and bear this level of publicity for every court document like you have in the US.
Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.
Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to regularly drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.
The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.
The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.
people have already forgotten the lessons of all those mugshots websites.
The full dataset will be in private hands and available everywhere to everyone to do anything the moment this goes live.
I protect data for a living, cost asymmetry and proof of work are really the only tools we have.
If this goes live, the next time I get subpoenaed to testify for something I'm going to throw in so many random but couched accusations at people just to screw them over when the data goes live at scale via data brokers and torrent dumps.
Bill Jones (accused in court testimony of killing puppies) is requesting the HOA get off of his back.
It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.
The current system still doesn't sit right with me. Someone sufficiently wealthy has effectively unlimited access. Someone sufficiently poor with a lot of time on their hands might also have unlimited access. Everyone in the middle has a bottleneck.
If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.
If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.
My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"