PACER (law)


PACER is an electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. It allows users to obtain case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts in accordance with the policies of the Judicial Conference, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States., it holds more than 500 million documents.
Each court maintains its own system, with a small subset of information from each case transferred to the U.S. Party/Case Index server, located in San Antonio, Texas at the PACER Service Center, each night. Records are submitted to the individual courts using the Federal Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system, and usually accepts the filing of documents in the Portable Document Format through the courts' electronic court filing system. Each court maintains its own databases with case information. Because PACER database systems are maintained within each court, each jurisdiction will have a different URL.
PACER has been criticized for being technically out of date and hard to use, and for demanding fees for records that are in the public domain. , legal challenges are being made regarding the fees and legislative action to eliminate them are in progress. In reaction, nonprofit projects have begun to make such documents available online for free. One such project, RECAP, was contributed to by activist Aaron Swartz; his downloading activities were investigated by the federal government. Although no crime was committed and no charges filed, the government closed its program of providing free public access to PACER.

Available information

The PACER System offers electronic access to case dockets to retrieve information such as:
PACER started in 1988 as a system accessible only by terminals in libraries and office buildings. Starting in 2001, PACER was made available over the Web.

Costs, revenues and free alternatives

The United States Congress has given the Judicial Conference of the United States authority to impose user fees for electronic access to case information. All registered agencies or individuals are charged a user fee.
The fee, as of April 1, 2012, to access the web-based PACER systems is $0.10 per page. Prior to that the fee was $0.08 per page and prior to January 1, 2005, the fee was $0.07 per page. The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one-page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum charge of $3.00 for electronic access to any single document other than name searches, reports that are not case-specific, and transcripts of federal court proceedings.
In March 2001, the Judicial Conference of the United States decided that no fee would be owed until a user accrued more than $10 worth of charges in a calendar year. If an account does not accrue $10 worth of usage between January 1 and December 31 of a year, the amount owed would be zeroed. In March 2010, that limit was effectively quadrupled, with users not billed unless their charges exceed $10 in a quarterly billing period. Beginning in 2012, the limit was $15 per quarter.
Effective with Version 2.4 of the PACER software, to comply with the E-Government Act of 2002, written opinions that "set forth a reasoned explanation for a court's decision" are supposed to be free of charge, but are sometimes billed for. In order to facilitate access to written opinions, the court system also provides them on CourtWeb, which does not require PACER registration but only has records from 30 courts.
Fee revenues get plowed back to the courts to finance technology. The New York Times reported PACER revenues exceeded costs by about $150 million, as of 2008 according to court reports. According to the Electronic Public Access Fee Schedule adopted by the Judicial Conference on :
A "policy note" attached to the Electronic Public Access Fee Schedule states:
Some courts such as the District Court for the District of Massachusetts have explicitly stated that "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP," In 2009, the Los Angeles Times stated that RECAP cuts into PACER revenue about $10 million.
Fees are not charged against federal agencies providing services authorized by the Criminal Justice Act.

Litigation over fees

In December 2015, Bryndon Fisher, a Seattle resident, filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims against the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, alleging that PACER overcharges its subscribers by billing by the number of bytes generated instead of by page count, and by overcounting the number of bytes. The case remains pending as of 2017
In April 2016, three non-profit organizations—the Alliance for Justice, the National Veterans Legal Services Program and the National Consumer Law Center—filed another class-action lawsuit, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, against the Administrative Office, alleging that the PACER fee structure did not conform to the E-Government Act of 2002, in that the fees were not only being used to maintain the system itself, but were being diverted to cover other costs of the federal courts, including courtroom audio systems and flat-screen televisions for jury use. In January 2017, judge Ellen Huvelle certified the class action. In March 2018, the judge ruled that the PACER fees were impermissibly used to cover unrelated costs; as of 2019 that holding is under appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
In November 2016, another putative class action relating to PACER was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The plaintiff there claims that PACER fails to provide its users with free access to "judicial opinions," in violation of PACER's contracts with its users as well as the E-Government Act of 2002. In September 2017, District Court Judge Robert N. Scola, Jr. denied the government's motion to dismiss the suit.
On September 6, 2018, Representative Doug Collins introduced the Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018,, which if enacted would eliminate PACER fees.

Reception

The New York Times has criticized PACER as "cumbersome, arcane and not free." In 2008, an effort led by Carl Malamud spent $600,000 in contributions to put a 50-year archive of records from the federal courts of appeals online for free. In a critical article, the magazine Reason described the system as "archaic as a barrister's wig."
Also in 2008, district courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office, opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. After activist Aaron Swartz, following an appeal by Malamud, downloaded about 2.7 million documents through a Sacramento library computer, to make them freely available to the public on Public.Resource.Org, the experiment was ended in late September 2008, with a notice from the GPO that the pilot program was suspended, "pending an evaluation." In October, a GPO representative said that "the security of the Pacer service was compromised." A FOIA request revealed later that the FBI had opened a full investigation against Swartz, which was dropped in April.
In 2009, a team from Princeton University and Harvard University's Berkman Center created software called "RECAP" which allows users to automatically search for free copies during a PACER search, and to help building up a free alternative database at the Internet Archive.