PACER's exorbitant fees (Public Access to Court Electronic Records)

In My Humble Opinion
1

(This is just a mild rant… not really pit-worthy but not sure where else to put it. It’s totally a 1% of the first-world problem, especially given all that’s going on with the government these days.)

So there’s this government website that provides access to US federal court records and documents. It’s called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). If you want to look up a federal court case, this system lets you do so online.

I’m glad that the service exists, but its fee structure really annoys me. It charges something like 10¢/page for documents (up to $3 max per document), more for audio files and search results. Yes, looking up a court case just to see what documents are available still costs money. Fortunately, there are waivers and you only get billed if you spent at least $30 in that financial quarter. Still, downloading a single PDF could cost you more renting a movie. Getting all the files for a multi-year court case could run into the hundreds of dollars.

But these are public domain records to begin with, paid for by taxpayers. Why are we double-billed for them? There have been several lawsuits and bills that have attempted to change the fees — they were not just covering the costs to operate PACER, but being siphoned away to pay for other court activities. There have also been bills that have tried to make the service free, but apparently the Congressional Budget Office calculated that it would take would cost $260 million to build such a system and then $15 million annually to run it.

That… is absurd. It is fundamentally a PDF archive. It should be free.

And indeed, there already IS a free alternative to PACER, RECAP, built by a small group out of Harvard and Princeton and now maintained by the nonprofit Free Law Project (more background on Wikipedia). An example court case on RECAP: Impossible Foods Inc. v. Impossible X LLC, 5:21-cv-02419 – CourtListener.com. The blue “Download PDF” buttons are documents it already has, and the “Buy on PACER” ones are still awaiting an upload from a PACER user.

Paying users of PACER upload copies to RECAP via a browser extension, after which RECAP makes it available for free to the world. The website is much faster and easier to use than PACER too. It accepts donations, but doesn’t cost a cent to users or taxpayers. There is no reason a system like PACER should cost multiple tens of millions to run.

I’m just annoyed. I know this barely qualifies as small-“c” corruption, a very minor detail compared to all the shenanigans going on in the US at large right now. But I was recently subpoenaed as a witness (see Legal procedure question: Quashing a subpoena to testify?), and RECAP was what let me find out basic background info about the case — even as someone directly affected by a case, I would otherwise have no way to get free access to its records or background. Paywalled justice :face_vomiting:

That said, I’m very grateful for RECAP and the Free Law Project. I just wish we didn’t have to depend on small nonprofits and volunteers to make basic public-domain judicial records available to the public…

Reasonable enough?

2

I can see how redundant fee structures are unfair to parties who haven’t time or resources to go through the paces. That taxpayers already are paying for PACER is also an irritation. I think I understand what you’re getting at.

3

I see what you did there :slight_smile:

But, yeah, it’s unfair (well, maybe just “unfriendly”) to poorer individuals or people who are already scared of the law and not so inclined to make a PACER account and provide billing info and potentially risk an uncapped bill if they click the wrong buttons… all just to download a PDF.

As a document archive, it’s also just plain… bad (I say that as a web developer, though, not a lawyer). It is hard to use, slow, ugly, expensive, requires a login even for basic searches and downloads… and, and, and…

But Wikipedia says the original system was made in 1988 and accessible only via specialized library terminals. It went on the web in 2001, so maybe it just hasn’t been touched much since then. PDF storage and distribution costs are much, much cheaper now than back then though.

I wish it were something more like Healthcare.gov or Recreation.gov, where significant efforts were made to make them more user-friendly and publicly usable.

4

I saw a hearing on Youtube where a poor pro se defendant claimed that being charged by the county for records pertinent to his case was a 6th Amendment violation. He did a really poor job of it, didn’t really invoke the 6th Amendment although was heading in that general direction, and didn’t point out the inequity that the DA gets copies for free. The judge overruled him but I thought, he had a good point. Would it be unconstitutional for the government to charge you $100 per page for legal documents you need in a criminal case?