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PACER Fetch APIs

free.law

70 pointsdanso28 comments

Thanks for posting this! I'm the executive director of Free Law Project. If anybody has any questions or comments, I'm happy to chat!

What are some of the more interesting legal documents that you've come accross?

I've seen a lot of interesting ones from Steven Biss, where he also sued YouTube in the David Seaman lawsuit. He is the attorney representing Nunes against Twitter for someone having a parody account about him. He is currently representing a guy named Robert Steele in a lawsuit against Jason Goodman that has a lot of very unique and interesting documents regarding cyberwarfare, dirty bomb hoaxes, informants being involved, etc.

Everything out of the Mueller report, frankly. It's history-making stuff. https://free.law/featured-cases/special-counsel/

I use the recap extension. Usually an uploaded PDF or docket is immediately available on courtlistener, but every so often there's a period of time where nothing gets updated; this happened briefly yesterday, for example. Is this some kind of maintenance?

I tend to browse Pacer side by side with courtlistener, e.g. get the docket, read through docket on courtlistener, then click through to buy the documents I want. When there's a delay like that I'm never quite sure if it was actually uploaded successfully so I go save the documents separately, it's inconvenient.

Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer? What I've noticed is that it'll show the docket entry if I have the extension installed, but it's an abbreviated form (e.g. "motion to dismiss" instead of a longer entry with party info, attachments, etc).

Yeah, we had some outage yesterday. Docker seems to be opening files and then not closing them again, which causes issues sooner or later. Sorry about that. The one redeeming thing with this is when this happens we're usually still getting your uploads, just not processing them. Anyway, sorry.

> Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer?

Yeah, we've experimented with that, but haven't gotten it nailed down yet. If somebody wanted to help, especially somebody with free-look access, we'd love to hear from you.

Also, there are some jurisdictions that appear to block the recap extension; at least I've noticed I can't load PDFs but incognito works, and turning on the extension in incognito makes it fail again.

Where would be the best place to report this?

Send me an email: mike@free.law. We can take a look. I don't know of any jurisdictions that have that issue, but it could be an emerging pattern or one we've missed.

Have you considered allowing people to "donate" their PACER accounts up to the free limit so that CourtListener could download documents directly without relying on a RECAP or API user to do it? With enough free accounts you might be able to start downloading every document in every case.

We're thinking about that, actually! There are a couple hard parts though:

1. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits?

2. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password somewhere?

Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter. Have you spent your entire free budget?"

Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.

1. Whatever docs your org feels have the highest value at that time.

2. The user provides their creds and you store them in Hashicorp Vault, AWS Param Store, or another secrets manager, and then retrieve them for use in making requests with a queue and runner mechanism.

If you have questions about this, email in profile. Last job was somewhere making requests for users with their creds at scale, currently in infosec. I would love to help make all PACER docs freely available.

I would say the easiest thing is make a web page that downloads documents from highly-viewed dockets, prioritizing opinions and other interesting entries using the API. The UI is something that just prompts for username/password/budget and then shows a list of the fetched documents.

Then if it's popular you can do more interesting things like prompting people to use the web page from the extension, moving the whole web page and fetch logic into the extension so it doesn't leak credentials, turning it into a cryptocurrency so people can fetch documents on demand, etc., but first things first.

Question for you: what other efforts are out there to improve free access to the documents trapped in PACER?

For anyone curious, this is part of a broader project to democratize access to often difficult-to-obtain or paywalled court opinions across many different jurisdictions, among other things.

Potentially stupid question: why is this a paid thing at all? Aren't court dockets public information?

It depends, but if they are public they still charge an obscene amount of money to get access to them. Sometimes like $0.50 per page and a $20 fee upfront for administrative costs. Pacer ain't cheap either. This will be a Godsend.

Not at all a stupid question. PACER's fees have been a source of controversy for years. They charge $0.10 per page or a max of $3 per document. There's been litigation about the fees[1], but it's still working its way through the court system. A couple of bills that eliminate the fees have been filed to in Congress over the last year or so, but they haven't gone anywhere.

It's also an incredibly technically outdated and user unfriendly system, so even without fees it would be worth scraping.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACER_(law)#Litigation_over_fe...

They are public. You can always go to the courthouse and use one of the computers to download documents for free.

Also, PACER bills quarterly, and your first $50 is free. Of course, if you are a party to the case, you can download for free as well.

It's $15, not $50.

Viewing them is free. Printing them is not. Also, you're assuming that the public access terminal is a computer. In some places, the "terminals" are human clerks, and the turnaround for searches are days to weeks.

And only the first $15 is free, but if you spend $16, you get charged the whole $16, not $1.

Not a dumb question. PACER costs some money to maintain, and the fees it charges also pays for the digital maintenance/upgrade of the court system overall. But there's substantial criticism that the fees it charges are still very excessive (10 cents per page, despite the actual cost of storage+retrieval being 1/20,000th of a cent), especially because it's taxpayer funded:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/politics/pacer-fees-la...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/pacer-court-recor...

https://qz.com/283772/why-pacer-should-and-should-not-be-lik...

The RECAP project is a great project, and highly recommend its use.

But PACER charges 10 cents per page for access and I don't have a problem with that. These fees keep the federal courts open to do vital business when Congress decides it's a good time for a shutdown. Any complaints re: PACER fees should be directed to Congress.

There are much better ways for the judiciary to maintain their finances than relying on arbitrary non-cost based fees for public access to public information. Judiciary funding is around $7 billion/year. Pacer makes maybe $150 million/year. Agree that Congress should fix Pacer fees, but the judiciary is not free from blame here.

I agree. I think it’s a travesty all court documents aren’t mandated to be freely accessible.

Call your congressional representative. Ask them to sponsor legislation to remove pay access to PACER.

C'mon. I don't think PACER should ever charge fees to access the laws of the land, but I could probably compromise on $0.10 a page only during a shutdown.

Sorry - that’s a bullshit argument. Because our government sucks at budgeting, we will just slap on some more fees to the end user? Total workaround and creating more issues than it is solving.

Every public court document should be available as a PDF for free of cost. No exceptions.

Congress did fix Pacer fees. They were very clear that they should pay for nothing but Pacer.

The courts ignored them and started robbing us.

I (the director of Free Law Project) agree with a lot of the other responses here, but I'll just add two points. First, technically PACER isn't a website. If you ask the judiciary, they'll tell you that PACER is only the public access system. So it's nuts that it rakes in $150M/year considering that Congress said they can only charge money for PACER to the extent it pays for itself. All of us that work on / use / think about PACER need to reframe this in our minds. PACER is not a website! (We're as guilty of this as anybody.) So...how much should it cost to run a basic credential system?

The second point is this: When should the gov't charge fees for services? Should cops cost money when they come help you? Schools? Yes, the fees help the gov't survive when Congress can't set a budget, but is that worth it or should our basic legal documents be freely available just like the courthouse itself is?

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