Friday Feedback
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This is that post where you give us some feedback.
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You might have noticed that more and more I am linking to https://courtlistener.com. There is a very good reason for this. They are doing a great job.
I’ve talked about how hard it is to find case documents and how expensive it is to get them from the government. CourtListener is a sort of crowdsourced legal document repository. If you want to help out CourtListener all you need to do is to download their “RECAP” browser extension and signup for a PACER account. They have instructions on the site.
When you are looking at a case, on CourtListener, it will either tell you that they already have the document, and you can just read it on their site. If they don’t, they will have a link to buy the document on PACER. When you buy the document on PACER, the RECAP add-on automatically uploads that document to the RECAP archive.
While it is expensive to download PACER documents, the big cost is doing searches on PACER. By using the links supplied by CourtListener, you don’t do any searches on PACER. It takes you directly to the page to purchase the documents you are looking for.
In addition, if you buy less than $30 worth of searches and downloads per quarter, PACER doesn’t charge you. This means that if you only download a couple of documents for RECAP from PACER, no charges.
Anyway, go give them a look if you are interested in looking at or for court documents.
CourtListener is a project run by the Free Law Project. To quote them:
We do this by:
- Curating and providing free, public, and permanent access to primary legal materials
- Developing software useful for legal research and innovation
- Fostering and supporting an open ecosystem for legal research
- Supporting academic research in the legal sector
A number of major projects exemplify this approach:
- The RECAP Suite — A collection of tools to open up federal court data.
- CourtListener.com — Our fully-searchable and accessible archive of court data including growing repositories of opinions, oral arguments, judges, judicial financial records, and federal filings.
- Bots.law — A collection of bots that help attorneys, journalists and the public keep up with court cases.