The non-profit host of CourtListener, RECAP, and the Big Cases bots. @free.law on Bluesky, @freelawproject on threads.
Oakland, CA
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If you're looking for us on other platforms:
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What happened today is huge. PACER reform passed the house during last Congress. Now it's headed for a senate vote with a gazillion cosponsors. When this bill passes, it will open up what's probably the biggest paywall in the world.
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The wait is over. Our massive new database of the investments and financial entanglements of nearly all federal justices, judges, and magistrates is finally live! free.law/2021/10/15/financia…
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Yesterday, 1.3 million people downloaded a court document from our website. People *want* primary references and will read them if it's open and free. MAKE PACER FREE NOW. Choose an informed citizenry.
Today is a good day to remember that federal court filings should be free to access and it's absolutely psychotic that they aren't.
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Four years in the making, today we are announcing a new one-of-a-kind database containing the investment and conflict information for every federal judge. Spanning 17 years, this database was extracted from over 250,000 pages of judicial financial records. free.law/2021/09/28/announci…
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The House Judicial Committee just came out strongly in favor of the "Free PACER" bill. The quotes are just incredible. We'll put some here....
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The "Free PACER" bill is scheduled for a vote tomorrow in @JudiciaryDems. Last year @uscourts made the wild claim that the bill would cost $2B and triple filing fees. Now they're saying it'd "abet criminality" by allowing anonymous access to legal documents.🤯 1/2
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If you're the person that's uploading thousands of dollars of PACER content to RECAP right now, this is wild, thank you! Drop us a line, we'd love to chat!
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We are getting utterly hammered by the Epstein docs and are working on a fix. In the meantime, the storage.courtlistener.com links work fine. Reply here with the storage links folks will want and hopefully we can recover the site. Thank you and apologies!
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We actually blocked these uploads because it was Saturday and our systems couldn't keep up, but PACER Santa has found a new IP address (or we missed one?), and we're now up to 85,405 PACER docs so far this month. We'd love to talk, PACER Santa!
If you're the person that's uploading thousands of dollars of PACER content to RECAP right now, this is wild, thank you! Drop us a line, we'd love to chat!
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Our first major legislative win is here. The judiciary must now build a website to publish the conflicts of federal judges. This will go a long way in building trust and accountability in the federal judiciary.
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Congress is voting on an unconstitutional bill today that will make it so federal judges can censor CourtListener. If this bill becomes law, we'll have to fight it in court or take down vital accountability information from our site. This is not OK.
Lawmakers have just added a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act protecting Supreme Court spouses from having to reveal any outside employer, in the name of security. If it passes, Ginni Thomas’s professional entanglements would effectively be state secrets.
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Getting ahead of a misconception we're seeing, this makes searches free:
- If and when they make a new system
- For non-commercial users only
- Which could be years
Doesn't apply to docs or dockets.
This changes nothing today, possibly ever.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If open legal info helps criminals, we'd already have a crisis! Millions of documents are available all over the Internet and yet...no problems. We hate to say it, but this feels like more FUD aimed at confusing lawmakers. 2/2
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Please, if you're a PACER user, consider using our free browser extension, which helps you save money and creates a huge, searchable public archive of PACER fillings: free.law/recap/
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The CBO score for the free PACER bill is finally (finally!) out. They think it'll cost $9M over ten years, not $2B like the judiciary claimed. cbo.gov/system/files/2020-12…
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🎉 We are officially launching alerts for PACER dockets! 🎉 Read all about it and please spread the word! free.law/2018/08/21/announci…
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Here's the full docket for United States v. Manafort in the RECAP Archive. It was just unsealed: courtlistener.com/docket/618…
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NEWS: The RECAP Archive now has every free opinion in PACER. free.law/2017/08/15/we-have-…
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We are 30k PDFs away from having every free opinion in PACER. This took months. We should be ready to share details soon.
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The most unfortunate thing from today's PACER testimony in the House Judicial Committee was that a judge said it cost $100M/year to run PACER, and nobody batted an eye. (Hint: Websites do not cost this much.) news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law…
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News! After more than a year in development, starting today there's a new way to RECAP the Law. Check it out and spread the word: free.law/2022/08/05/send-us-…
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This just in. @fixthecourt FOIA'ed the DOJ's PACER bill for the last five years. Yes, the DOJ must pay for federal filings, just like the rest of us. No, it doesn't make sense, but now we have it for 2010 to present — a total of about $55 million dollars. free.law/pacer-facts/#gov-pa…
ALT A table from the link, showing the amounts each year starting in 2010 and going until 2023.
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@waltshaub we have been working for four years to make nearly 30,000 judicial financial disclosure reports easily available to the public. Today we released them as searchable data in a big new archive. Any case you'd like to help get the word out?
The wait is over. Our massive new database of the investments and financial entanglements of nearly all federal justices, judges, and magistrates is finally live! free.law/2021/10/15/financia…
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Nobody will care given...*gestures broadly,* but we also got a verdict today. In 2021 we and others were sued for putting legal records online. With pro bono support from GT Law, we fought to keep the records up. We won. They appealed. Today we won again! The records stay up!
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This project has been in the works for many years, and our fervent hope is that this new database will be used by others to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and transparent.
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I know you use RECAP, Jeff, but for those that are seeing this, we have to mention that it can help with PACER fees. This problem is so idiotic. Thank you for your research in the face of this.
Here's a link to RECAP for those that don't yet have it: free.law/recap/
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We are currently:
- Uploading six million PACER dockets to @internetarchive
- Uploading thousands of oral argument recordings to @internetarchive
- Downloading 520 oral arguments from 11th circuit to make them searchable
- Writing blog post & newsletter on all of above!
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If you use PACER, install RECAP. free.law/recap/
Here's why.....
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Big news today. The "Free PACER" bill has been reintroduced by @RepHankJohnson and @repdarrellissa.
It's go time to modernize PACER, make it free, and make it secure. issa.house.gov/media/press-r…
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The huge PACER class action lawsuit is finally settled. $125,000,000 will be distributed by the treasury's "Judgement Fund." courtlistener.com/docket/421…
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This is it! Open and free PACER just sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee while gaining a zillion cosponsors. This is happening. Get ready for the transparency you deserve.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has just voted to advance a bill to make PACER free, after it appears the bulk of the panel decided during the hearing to join as co-sponsors of the bipartisan legislation.
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We're now up to 117,180 PACER documents from PACER Santa and they just keep coming. How long can this go for? Do we need to be scaling our servers,PACER Santa? Who are you? How long will this go on??
If you're the person that's uploading thousands of dollars of PACER content to RECAP right now, this is wild, thank you! Drop us a line, we'd love to chat!
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Since 2009, we and others have been building a complete database of case law. Today we mark the next step in that project: We have added every case from the Harvard Law Library to CourtListener. This is a big post about the work we did and what's next: free.law/2024/03/26/all-the-…
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That's it! The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act passes both the Senate and the House and is headed for Biden's desk for signature! WOOO!
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The federal government illegally charges ~$145/yr for access to public court records. This lawsuit seeks to tear that paywall down: nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/po…
Since 2009 the RECAP Extension has been lowering fees and making an open archive of PACER content: free.law/recap/
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This is the culmination of the work we've done with others to force the judiciary to put their financial disclosures online. It's very good progress and the judiciary should be proud to join the other branches in fulfilling this important transparency measure. That said....
Federal judges’ financial disclosure and periodic transaction reports are now accessible to the public through a new free database. uscourts.gov/news/2022/11/07…
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🚨 The judicial branch is lobbying to oppose a Free PACER system. Federal judges have been given obscene talking points about the Open Courts Act and are being asked to spread the message to members of Congress. Today we and others respond with a letter. free.law/pdf/letters/letter-…
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Launching today is:
1. Disclosure info on the CourtListener website via a new page: courtlistener.com/financial-…
2. API access to all the data we have extracted from these documents.
3. Beautiful PDFs of every doc we've got.
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News! We're launching a new *free* API today we're calling "PACER Fetch." Want JSON or PDFs from PACER? This'll do it. free.law/2019/11/05/announci…
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Nadler: "Judiciary records systems have long lagged behind modern standards of accessibility and openness."
"It is a disservice that in today's digital age the public's access to public records and public proceedings is so resource-intensive and burdensome."
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The judicial branch commissioned @18F to do an 11-week study of PACER/CM/ECF. The result is a monumental leap forward in the effort to fix the PACER problem. Finally, we have some details about what's happening with this vital resource. A few notes… nitter.app/waldojaquith/status/13…
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Welp, the folks who run PACER just signed a five-year $300M "blanket" contract with General Dynamics to work on CM/ECF/PACER. This is …um…how to put it delicately…terrible? Imagine telling somebody you'll give 'em $300 to do unspecified work. gdit.com/about-gdit/press-re…
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A for-profit donated a truly huge PACER dataset to us and we have begun importing it.
It has docket entry descriptions and metadata, and after importing 0.2% of the data we created about 400k new items. 🤯
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After months of effort, we are absolutely thrilled to launch our new tool for searching PACER content. free.law/2016/11/22/free-law…
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This should be working and scaling now. From here you can get what you need: courtlistener.com/docket/435…
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More Nadler: "This does not reflect the modern standards the public deserves"
"it is indfensible that the public must pay fees...to know what is happening in their own courts."
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More Nadler: "The PACER paywall also restricts access to justice by increasing the cost of doing the research needed to compentently pursue a case, inhibits innovation of legal services, and [...] reduces judicial transparency and legitimacy of the courts."
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An open and complete database of court opinions is an essential part of a functioning democracy. For over a decade, we and others have been working to make that a reality. Today, we announce a big collaboration with @vlex to make it so. Learn more: free.law/2022/09/12/vlex-par…
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We're posting a lot right now, so we hope you'll read and amplify this post. It could be the most important thing we've ever done. We're building an open eFiling system, we're hiring to do it, and we're looking for courts to partner with. Spread the word. free.law/2023/12/12/open-efi…
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We lack FOIA laws for the legislative and judicial branches, so your best bet is to use the "Common Law Right of Access." BuzzFeed did so here, and won.
This lays the groundwork for doing the same in the judicial branch, until a real FOIA law is forged there.
BIG NEWS: Capitol Police is not subject to #FOIA so in Feb @BuzzFeedNews & I w/our atty @_LightLaw leading the charge sued the police for docs about Jan 6 citing the common law right of access and WE WON!
This is a significant legal victory
buzzfeednews.com/article/jas…
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Big news for transparency: The Eastern District of California FINALLY enabled the RSS feed on their PACER site.
This is a victory for openness that we and others have been working on for years. This news is both thrilling (we did it!) utterly depressing (it was just so hard).🧵
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Big news! Our major new opinion summarization feature is live! This launches over a million expert-written summaries of nearly 400,000 opinions. Never before has it been so easy to understand the law. We're really thrilled with this one: free.law/2022/03/17/summariz…
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We just deleted thousands of court records from our servers because the PACER fee schedule is an unethical racket. A few words in a weekend thread....
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It cost us about $500 to serve more than 20 million PACER files last month. If PACER served that many files at an average cost of 70¢, taxpayers would have to pay the judiciary about $14,000,000. We're not math nerds, but that's 28,000× more money. Weird.
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Abolish PACER fees now.
And, hate to be a broken record, but PACER (the fed courts doc system) sucks and costs money. I paid $3 to make this brief available to everyone on CourtListener for free. IOW, a paid Law Dork subscription ($6/mo) lets me make two briefs available monthly: lawdork.com/subscribe
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A few weeks ago, the gov't body that runs PACER wrote a long letter to the House Judiciary Committee opposing free PACER. Today, along with @FixTheCourt, we respond: fixthecourt.com/wp-content/u…
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In light of the circumstances, the AO should consider creating an emergency PACER fee waiver. PACER fees are going to be a huge barrier to the public's understanding of the dozens of criminal cases coming out of the storming of the Capitol.
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In tandem with developing this new data, we collaborated with a team of investigative journalists at The Wall Street Journal.
They spent the past several months diving into the data. The first of their groundbreaking reports is out today: wsj.com/articles/131-federal…
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We are incredibly proud to join in an amicus brief today explaining all the ways PACER fees hamper innovation and fairness in the judicial system. free.law/pdf/NVLSP-v-United-…
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We just heard from federal court staff that's dealing with the sealed documents hack. Thing are very bad and there's a mad scramble to get things figured out.
Have some patience and kindness for court staff. They're working incredibly hard right now under insane pressure.
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We are now uploading 72,000 PACER PDFs to the Internet Archive. This is the fruit of your uploads over the past few months and would cost about $50,000 to purchase again. Thank you!
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We're launching a huge new project to get all the free content out of PACER and make it searchable and available. free.law/2017/03/27/why-we-a…
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For the past couple years we have been making CourtListener ready for any amount of traffic. So if somebody wants to RECAP a certain search warrant application, we're ready.
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Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Onwards to the Senate, then we get online financial disclosures for judges! Yes!
Holy cow—the House has passed a bill to fix the court(s)!
HR 5720, the Courthouse Ethics & Transparency Act: docs.house.gov/billsthisweek….
@FreeLawProject made the database 💵
@POGOwatchdog was 🎯 on judicial stocks
+ we did our part re: online disclosures
Now, on to the Senate...
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We truly want to leave Twitter, but our followers are here. We encourage you to leave this place and join us elsewhere. It's not that hard and the other places all have headlines.
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Our director, @mlissner, has been selected by the federal judiciary to serve on the PACER User Group. The group's mandate is to "provide advice and feedback on the development, implementation, and enhancement of electronic public access services provided by the federal judiciary,
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Another 22k uploads into the RECAP Archive from PACER Santa today. Still don't know who they are, but we're not complaining!
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We are working with a court and just generated our first several thousand neutral citations for their entire back collection of opinions. The law is freed and this court is no longer beholden to a for-profit publisher for citations. More details soon.
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In September we, along with DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, and others, were ordered to remove court documents and webpages from the Internet. With support from the @SamuelsonClinic at @BerkeleyLaw we were able to push back and set some good 1A precedent: free.law/2020/12/30/victory-…
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Momentum is building to ban stock trading by members of Congress (Pelosi's now on board‽). We've shown (with WSJ) that judges can't get it right. The next logical step is to ban stock trading across all branches. Huzzah to this! It makes sense. It's necessary. It's timely.
I love energy to ban stock trades in Congress and I’m now announcing new bill to create single standard across 3 branches to stop President Cabinet Congress Judges from owning individual stocks. President & others cannot have conflicts of interest.THREAD
kim.house.gov/media/press-re…
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News! RECAP is now available for Safari on macOS, iPhones, and iPads. If you use PACER and want to save money while building a massive, searchable database of filings, give it a try! apps.apple.com/us/app/recap/…
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If we charged what PACER does, we would have made over half a million dollars yesterday. Instead, we made zero and charged zero. Our server fees will be close to zero.
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Our executive director filed a brief where he and a colleague analyzed how much it'd cost to run PACER if it was done in a modern way. It wasn't pretty. courtlistener.com/recap/gov.…
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The free PACER bill might get a vote in Congress next week! NEXT WEEK!
The judicial branch is fighting this tooth and nail. Congress needs to hear from us.
Please, take a second now and tell your representatives to vote YES on the Open Courts Act: act.myngp.com/Forms/41078549…
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.@uscourts just wrote a formal, detailed letter to Congress about why it opposes the PACER reform bill. Now Congress's job is to take the letter with a big ol' grain of salt and pass the bill anyway. Free PACER is obviously a net good. We need to just do it.
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Our webhook system is finally complete! Using this system, you can get real time updates when there are new filings in particular cases or when search queries have new data. You can automate your CMS or take action when cases change. Learn more: courtlistener.com/help/api/w…
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1/ Last year, we and others were sued for posting a federal court case on our websites. We won the case back in October of last year, and yesterday we won the appeal. The case stays up. reason.com/volokh/2023/09/22…
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A bit of news today. First, with some volunteer help (from a high schooler!), we are releasing a new tool called "X-Ray". Give it a PDF and it'll tell you if the PDF has worthless redactions in it: github.com/freelawproject/x-…
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WSJ is at it again with their *12th* article about the financial conflicts of judges. Today's article uses our disclosure database to uncover a judge whose wife had $20k of Amazon stock while he made rulings in favor of Amazon. Not a good look. wsj.com/articles/an-amazon-s…
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Big news! Rep. Schiff just introduced a bill to bring FOIA to the federal judiciary. The bill will bring commonsense transparency rules to the judiciary so that journalists and members of the public can hold it accountable and understand how it works. 1/2 schiff.house.gov/news/press-…
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Today's the first meeting of the PACER User Group. Since PACER has never had an issue or feature tracker, we made one and populated it with 61 ideas. Read the ideas here: github.com/freelawproject/pa… and learn more here: github.com/freelawproject/pa…
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More Johnson: "The prices are like a keep out sign for the little guy."
"It can cost hundreds of dollars to read the filings in one case."
"$100-140M/year is a lot of money taken from people who are exercising their fundamental right to access public court documents."
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PACER Santa seems to be have stopped for the moment. This is sad, but it's a good break for our poor servers.
PACER Santa, we hardly knew you, whoever you are! Come back soon.
If you're the person that's uploading thousands of dollars of PACER content to RECAP right now, this is wild, thank you! Drop us a line, we'd love to chat!
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Financial disclosures by judges were mandated in 1978 by the Ethics in Gov't Act, a Watergate transparency reform. Until today, these forms have never been compiled into a database. It was too hard to get the documents and too complicated to extract the info they contained.
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In July of last year, we asked the judicial branch for a spreadsheet of all federal magistrate judges. We're very happy to share that this data — which has never been available like this before — was delivered to us today. More info here: github.com/freelawproject/co…
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We're struggling to keep things up today due to the unsealing of Epstein-related documents. Sorry about this. It's more traffic than we've ever seen outside of a directed attack.
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You have to hand it to the academics proving the voting rights issues so courts can deal with them. In a case out of FL today, academics proved that the order of candidates on ballots matters, and the court enjoined FL from doing so in future elections.
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More than 50,000 PACER documents from our collection have now been shared on social networks. In the face of misinformation, this is one way we can all fight back.
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For anybody interested in following the case, here's a link to the docket where you can sign up for alerts (or RSS): courtlistener.com/docket/626…. The complaint is here: courtlistener.com/docket/626…
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Obviously, this contravenes the goal of PACER. It also makes reproducing research largely impossible. Anyway, sayonara court records. Into the trash you go. This is so dumb and can't go on. Congress needs to step in.
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We just heard that a memo has gone out from the all federal courts to encourage the use of RSS feeds!
PACER RSS feeds are now the official recommendation across the land!
Now to see which courts actually *listen* to the guidance.
🚨RSS FEED VICTORY🚨 — hopefully! In a letter we received from the AO today, their director says they will "be sending a survey [...] to identify and resolve specific implementation issues and to encourage courts to utilize this valuable public access tool." That's it folks.
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So, 43 years after these forms were mandated, we're thrilled to be finally putting them online for public inspection. To learn more about the project and the coming timeline, please see our post explaining everything: free.law/2021/09/28/announci…
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