Cool!..............
Posted on 09/18/2020 9:58:36 AM PDT by zeugma
There is a bill before Congress called the "Open Courts Act", that is designed to make it easier for members of the public to have access to court documents at the Federal District and Appellate level.
The bill is HR-8235, and is co-sponsored by Hank Johnson and Doug Collins.
I would strongly support this as it is something we sorely need. Today, when a decision is made in federal courts at the district and appellate level, if you want to read the decision itself or transcript of the oral arguments, you have to have an account with the PACER system. Costs for PACER access is insane. You pay 10¢ per search and 10¢ per page of the document itself. As many, if not most decisions are more than 50-90 pages long, you're looking at significant costs if you are interested in looking at the primary document of the decision itself rather than having to rely on the reporting of the fake news media.
The Supreme Court already makes argument transcripts and opinions available for free to anyone to read. The rest of the federal judiciary should be the same.
For myself, I'm not nearly as interested in reading through all of the filed documents and such, but see no reason why those shouldn't be available as well. We pay a lot of money to support the legal system and since citizens are required to know and understand the clarifications and expansions of law as rendered through the legal system, it seems strange to me that in this day of electronic documents, that it isn't freely available to all in all federal courts like it is with the Supreme Court.
Some will argue that the current PACER system is financed through these various fees. To that I ask, "so what"? Making these documents available to the public is an actual legitimate function of government, unlike so much that the government funds with our tax dollars.
Additionally, legal decisions at the District or Appellate level can be extremely educational. Do we, or do we not want the public to be able to understand how and why the legal decisions that so strongly affect our lives are made? I would argue that such education is also a legitimate governmental function.
I would strongly urge those of you who would support such a thing to contact your congress and senate critters and let them know that you support opening up our legal system to public access.
Hopefully FR won't relegate this to chat, as it's something that is actually fairly important.
If your cost is less than $15 per quarter you do not have to pay anything. But I agree, it should all be free as access to the actual locations where you could look up this info is now very restricted or not easy to get to. All kinds of Bankruptcy info is available on PACER as well.
Cool!..............
So much easier to collect dirt.
This is exactly the type of so-called vanity (non-vanity actually) that we need. Real information. Thanks.
This is a good idea. I can’t get pacer to work for me and no way to fix it.
This would be useful at a municipal level as well. Putting them in a machine readable format (xml,json,etc) would be even better.
Imagine being able to easily do a study and compare say, the number of people arrested for rioting in portland and the percent of those actually prosecuted, and the number of those rearrested. Compare those values to arrest/prosecution results for praying in front of an abortion clinic or attending a religious service. Big Data is waiting.
There's one in every crowd. (grin)
Docs on Pacer can be accessed for free at the Clerk’s office. And the Pacer fees for remote access keep the government out of the taxpayer’s pockets.
One concern that many would have is that defendants who cooperate in the federal system can be more easily exposed by unfettered public access to court records. Your proposal is more appropriate for the federal courts of appeals.
I’m mainly concerned about decisions themselves (and preferably oral arguments at appeal), than I am individual filings and whatnot. What brought this to mind for me especially is that I the other day I was looking for a copy of the District court decision a few days ago regarding the huge slapdown in Pennsylvania of the government’s Chinese Flu shutdown regulations. I eventually did find it, which someone had posted to google docs, but I should have been able to go straight to the source.
The Supreme Court provides direct access to both arguments and the decisions themselves. I don’t see why other feral courts do not.
Yeah, that's a solution.
I think this quote from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is relevant...
"But the plans were on display…"
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That’s the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'. Ever think of going into advertising? "
Thanks! Apparently the mods didn't agree. I can't find it on the front page anymore. *shrug*
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