Monday, February 04, 2008
New Site 'Recycles' PACER Documents

I can barely keep up with the efforts of Carl Malamud and his public.resource.org to "liberate" government documents. (See 1.8M Pages of Federal Case Law to Go Public and More Government Docs to Go on Web.) The latest project: Recycle Your Used Pacer Documents!. PACER, of course, is the federal judiciary's system for obtaining case and docket information electronically. The acronym stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, but that public access comes with a catch -- a registration requirement and a user fee of 8 cents per page.

The folks at public.resource.org believe that PACER's registration requirement and fees create needless obstacles to public access. The idea behind this site is to provide a way for PACER users to upload and share the documents they download from PACER, making them available to others without cost. The site's operators will review the uploads and post them in bulk.resource.org for future use. (They do this manually, they say, so don't expect your uploads to appear immediately.) Once added to the system, documents are listed by court and then by docket number. It appears to be searchable on at least a limited basis using Google's search-this-site feature (e.g.: "site:bulk.resource.org queryterm queryterm").

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 3:54 PM, , links to this post

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
1.8M Pages of Federal Case Law to Go Public

Carl Malamud's nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase today announced an agreement that will allow Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of federal case law in the public domain. The archive, which will become available sometime in 2008, will include all U.S. courts of appeals decisions since 1950 and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. I wrote in August about Malamud's charge to crash the Wexis gate with his plan to create a public-domain repository of all case law, federal and state, and I first wrote about him a decade ago in recognition of his work to bring the SEC's EDGAR database to the public. In today's statement, he said:
"The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register. Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable."

Notably, this public-domain database will come about with the cooperation of a for-profit legal research company. Fastcase has agreed to sell this case law in a one-time transaction that will allow Public.Resource.Org to use it. The cases will be marked with a new Creative Commons mark -- CC-Ø -- that signals that there are no copyrights or other related rights attached to the content.

Once it receives the cases, Public.Resource.Org will format them using open source "star" mapping software, which will allow the insertion of markers that will approximate page breaks based on user-furnished parameters such as page size, margins, and fonts. "Wiki" technology will be used to allow the public to move around these markers, as well as add summaries, classifications, keywords, alternate numbering systems for citation purposes, and ratings or "diggs" on opinions.

Going forward, new cases will be added to the database through organizations that already make cases publicly available, such as AltLaw and the Legal Information Institute.

Today's announcement said that further news "will be forthcoming on the availability of other case law, including Federal District and pre-1949 Appellate decisions."

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 1:03 PM, , links to this post

Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Third Federal Court Posts Audio Online

I noted here in August that two federal trial courts had started posting audio recordings of courtroom proceedings online and that three others were slated to follow. Now one of those three has started posting audio of its proceedings, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Alabama. The two courts that started in August were the U.S. District Court in Nebraska and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of North Carolina. The audio recordings are available through PACER at a cost of 16 cents. A court spokesperson said that the other two courts slated to join this pilot project -- the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Bankruptcy Court in Maine -- have experienced technical glitches but should go live soon.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 10:21 PM, , links to this post

Tuesday, September 18, 2007
All U.S. Trial Transcripts to Go Online

All transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings will be available online through the federal judiciary's PACER system, the Judicial Conference announced today. Transcripts will be posted to PACER 90 days after they are submitted to the court and will cost eight cents a page to view, download or print.

The Judicial Conference today also approved a pilot project to provide free public access to PACER at 15 federal depository libraries.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 4:45 PM, , links to this post

Thursday, May 10, 2007
7th Circuit Launches Judiciary's First Wiki

The National Law Journal today reports that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has launched its own wiki, a first for the federal judiciary. The wiki will allow lawyers and judges to post and change notes on procedure and practice. It launches with the complete contents of the Seventh Circuit Practitioner's Handbook. Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, who spearheaded the project, told the NLJ:
"The goal is to concentrate on procedure (in both the court of appeals and the district courts) but not to cover substance. We aren't interested in comments about the meaning of ERISA or the Internal Revenue Code and will take down any pages that go beyond the scope of practice and procedure (including jurisdiction)."
As I noted here earlier this week, my Law Technology News article surveying legal wikis is currently available on Law.com Legal Technology.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 10:37 AM, , links to this post