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Comment by rguzman | Hacker News Reader

Court records are, in general, public. Not 'public'. Just go to the library. However, PACER costs money and so do the favored online vendors (westlaw and lexis-nexis).

Even if they aren't public. They should be. This stuff can be used as law -- precedents. The only valid objection I see is that there needs to be some process to protect the privacy of the people involved in the case. But that's second-order concern.

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They should be public but are behind a wall. Thus, the quotes.

"The only valid objection I see is that there needs to be some process to protect the privacy of the people involved in the case."

There already is: you can file documents under seal or in redacted form. Most courts require you to do so if you're including information such as social security numbers. See, i.e. http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/invitationstocomment/documents/s...

Nothing that's available via PACER couldn't be read by walking down to the courthouse and requesting the physical file.

PACER records are public, even that they cost money to access. So are most of the records on Lexis and Westlaw. Westlaw has tried to claim a copyright in certain annotations on the court documents, but they have no copyright in the text of the court records themselves.[1]

[1] Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co., 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1998) - http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/158/158.F3d.693.97-...

I don't know much about what PACER includes and what exactly is covered by Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis, but Altlaw (http://altlaw.org) is a "free, full-text, searchable database of U.S. case law", and I've heard it being mentioned in the context of Lexis-Nexis. Also has the extra cool aspect of having been done by Stuart Sierra, whom all the Clojure folks around here probably know well.

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