Supreme Court, in Big Leap, Plans to Put Filings Online

The article begs the question: Will it be completely free or behind yet another artificial but officially-sanctioned paywall and login like PACER.gov? The article clearly didn't any meaningful research because PACER and similar state/federal outsourced/homegrown paywalls are bullshit, and likely why SCOTUS advocated a separate system. The key is whether it will truly provide free and open access to decisions and documents. If not, it would be another Not Invented Here duplication of PACER. (Let's assume it won't be as crappy as PACER, because SCOTUS is presumed to contain a measure of common-sense.)

The bigger meta question is: why are courts still allowed to monetize the automated services that are provided at neglible unit cost? Just because lawyers are often chisels doesn't mean the government is allowed to profit from the restriction of access to the people's information, and that automated processes (downloading PDFs) are no longer equivocable to manually making copies of thousands of pages of documents. This puts an undue burden on most people that don't have millions of dollars to throw around and it puts up a barrier to actual transparency of legal artifacts. These sorts of things should be free, but the article does neither explicitly state nor implicitly hint to the cost of this yet-to-be-named SCOTUS system.

Even more meta: Shouldn't civil rights include the freedom to access all public information produced by a government with minimal (at cost of delivery) or no cost?

(IANALBIPOOTI)

This is a positive development overall--likely in response to pressure from Senator Leahy, who chairs (or is about to have chaired?) the Senate Judiciary Committee--but a lot of things make no sense.

- Supreme Court documents will be free. That's great. But district and appellate documents will still be $0.10 per page? Why? Both are public information. Arguably if Supreme Court documents are more important, then they should be more valuable, and therefore more expensive. This is totally inconsistent and no explanation is given.

- Taxpayers now have to foot the bill (many tens of millions and counting) for "NextGen" CM/ECF and this supposed separate system for the Supreme Court that will not be available until 2016. So far the only next-generation feature released as part of NextGen CM/ECF is the ability to have one username and a password you set yourself. For this we have paid many, many millions of dollars over about five years.

- Roberts cites procurement considerations to justify the totally unacceptable delay in adopting technology. Yet where are the RFPs for NextGen CM/ECF and the Supreme Court's docketing system? Why, they're nowhere to be found, either because they don't exist or they're not publicly available.

- Roberts argues that the courts have an obligation to avoid jumping on technological bandwagons too quickly. Perhaps that's prudent. He fails, however, to address courts using technology as a weapon against the poor. See http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130217/petitioning-r....

- Paper filing will still be required. Why?

Fundamentally Roberts' views on technology are a reflection of the views of the profession that created him. Lawyers generally do not believe that they are subject to the same forces as the rest of the world, technological forces included. Roberts posits in his report that technologies "come and go." Well, so do useless (and often harmful), self-important overpriced middlemen who complicate processes that would frequently otherwise be just fine without them.

Meanwhile, my lawsuit against the Administrative Office of the United States Courts over these issues continues. See http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe....