Today, the PACER system contains millions of court filings for the federal district, circuit, and bankruptcy courts, most of which are sold at a dime per page with a three dollar cap per document. But content in PACER was not always priced this way, and indeed the PACER system goes back all the way to the early 1990’s, before computers were generally connected to the Internet.

Fees for using PACER are set by the Judicial Conference of the Administrative Office of the Courts, which scrupulously keeps notes from its bi-annual proceedings going back to its creation in 1922. In this post, we have gone through all of the relevant proceedings, and we present what we believe is a complete history of PACER fees and changes.

During the 27 year history outlined below, technology has changed significantly, and the Administrative Office of the Courts has done its best to keep up. Over the years, PACER has offered a variety of ways to get court information. These include a 1-900 number, a search service available via a regular phone call, the ability to connect your own computer directly to the courts’, and the websites that we know today.

But regardless of ...

We have a small update to share today, as we’ve wrapped up adding thousands of historical Supreme Court citations to our collection. These are the original citations for the Supreme Court from 1754 to 1874, from before when the United States Reports had begun. Previously we had many of these citations, but as of today we can say we have historical citations for our entire SCOTUS collection.

For the unfamiliar, Supreme Court citations were originally named after the Reporter of Decisions for the Supreme Court from the time the opinion was published. For example, the first person to do this was Alexander Dallas, and his citations start at 1 Dall. 1 (1754), and go forward to 4 Dall. 446 (1806). After Dallas came a long line of other reporters, each of whom named their series of books after himself until 1875, when congress began appropriating money for the full time creation of these reporters and demanded they be called the “United States Reports.”

A snapshot of 18 Stat. 204 (1874), which allocated $25,000 to the Supreme Court for printing (about $557,100 ...

Today we are launching a new project to download all of the free opinions and orders that are available on PACER. Since we do not want to unduly impact PACER, we are doing this process slowly, giving it several weeks or months to complete, and slowing down if any PACER administrators get in touch with issues.

In this project, we expect to download millions of PDFs, all of which we will add to both the RECAP Archive that we host, and to the Internet Archive, which will serve as a publicly available backup.¹ In the RECAP Archive, we will be immediately parsing the contents of all the PDFs as we download them. Once that is complete we will extract the content of scanned documents, as we have done for the rest of the collection.

This project will create an ongoing expense for Free Law Project—hosting this many files costs real money—and so we want to explain two major reasons why we believe this is an important project. The first reason is because there is a monumental value to these documents, and until now ...

Today we are launching party, attorney, and firm search for the RECAP Archive of PACER documents. This unlocks powerful new ways to do your research.

For example, consider the following queries:

• Cases where Apple Computer is a party
  • …and they’re represented by Latham & Watkins
  • …that took place in the Eastern District of Texas
  • …and have a nature of suit code containing “patent”
  • …and that mention the term “radio” anywhere in a document
  • …including only motions

Click any of the above queries to see how they were made.

To use this new feature, type the name of the party or attorney into the fields on the RECAP Archive homepage or in the sidebar to the left of any search results. These boxes also accept advanced query syntax, and there are several new fields that can be queried from the main search box including party, attorney, and firm.

For example, in the main box you can search for attorney:”eric holder”~2 firm:covington. This query shows the cases where the attorney has the word “Eric” within two words of “Holder” (thus ...

Recently, as part of our routine business practices, we discovered what we believe is a major vulnerability in the PACER system of websites that we believe affects both the electronic case filing and public access portals.

At this time, as part of a responsible disclosure process, we have notified the appropriate parties at The Administrative Office of the Courts, the agency that runs PACER. According to industry norms, we have given them a broad 90 day window to resolve the vulnerability.

After the 90 days are up or the issue is resolved, we plan to publish the details of what we discovered, the ramifications of the discovery, and the solution that they have put in place, if any.

Further questions about the vulnerability can be directed to our contact form where you can find our GPG key, if needed.

EMERYVILLE, CA — Free Law Project is proud to announce that it has been selected by researchers at Georgia State University to provide PACER data for their research on employment misclassification lawsuits. The purpose of their research is to gain an understanding of how courts distinguish between employees and independent contractors, and the factors influencing those decisions across federal jurisdictions. This research will be funded by a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, and will be conducted by primary researchers Charlotte S. Alexander and Mohammad Javad Feizollahi of Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business.

Free Law Project’s role in this grant will be to acquire court opinions and orders from PACER, and to provide them to Alexander and Feizollahi for their research. Because PACER is not optimized for automated access, a key outcome of the grant will be to develop tools and infrastructure to enable other researchers to utilize PACER data through future grants.

“PACER data is too difficult for researchers to access, and it’s high time that a ...

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today on the topic of the “the effectiveness of the PACER service and use of audio and video recordings of courtroom procedures.” Three witnesses were invited by the committee to speak at the hearing, including our board member, Thomas Bruce, who spoke at length on the topic of reforming the PACER system. His written testimony can be found here.

Bruce framed his testimony by providing an overview of the things that PACER is and is not. In his words, these are the characteristics that define PACER:

1. First, PACER charges fees for access to public records.
2. Second, PACER became outmoded two years after it was built, and in some ways has never caught up.
3. Third, PACER suffers from a split personality. On one hand, it is an electronic filing and case management system that supports the Federal courts […]On the other […] it is a data publishing system that offers the work of the Federal courts, both documents and metadata, to a very wide range of people[…]

And these are the things, in his words, that it is not:

1. It is ...

Free Law Project is proud to share that in our effort to create the most complete online collection of opinions, today we added 24 Attorney General advisory opinions relating to the Emoluments Clause and dating from 1952 to 2009. Attorney General advisory opinions are written by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, and provide legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies.

The opinions we added today were made available to Politico in 2012 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, and were recently published on their website. Included in the opinions is a range of advisory guidance on topics ranging from whether Nixon could accept anonymous donations to pay for his taxes to whether President Obama could accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

As with all of the opinions on CourtListener, we have completed OCR on these opinions, and their contents are immediately available for search, bulk download, and via our APIs. Free Law Project is proud to include these in CourtListener.com’s collection of over 1,000 Attorney General advisory ...

We’re proud to share that we’ve now linked together our database of judges and our database of oral argument recordings. This means that as of now if you look at the profile page for a judge, you may see a list of oral argument recordings for cases that judge heard.

For example, on the page for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is a new section that looks like this:

Ginsburg has participated in hundreds of oral arguments that we have in our system.

Clicking on the button at the bottom takes you back to our database of oral argument recordings where you can further refine your search. If the judge is active, there is an icon in the upper right that lets you subscribe to a podcast of the cases heard by that judge. At this time, these features are only available for the Supreme Court and for jurisdictions where the judges for specific cases are provided by the court website. We hope to expand this in the future.

To our knowledge, a linkage like this has never previously existed on any system ...

On Tuesday we were proud and humbled to receive a Le Hackie award from the D.C. Legal Hackers group for a top ten legal hack of the year:

We're honored and humbled to get a Le Hackie award last night from @DCLegalHackers for our PACER research! Wish we could have been there!

— Free Law Project ⚖ (@FreeLawProject) January 12, 2017

The “hack” that we received this award for was our series of blog posts about PACER:

• How Much Money Does PACER Make?

• The Cost of PACER Data? Around One Billion Dollars.

• Downloading Important Cases on PACER Costs More than a Brand New Car

• What is a “Page” of PACER Content?

And our older pieces:

• What is the “PACER Problem”?

• What Should be Done About the PACER Problem?

D.C. Legal Hackers is an amazing group, and we’re really proud to get this award from them.

Just a quick post today to share that our oral argument podcasts are now available on iTunes.

If you are a user of iTunes, you can easily subscribe to our podcasts by opening iTunes and searching for “Free Law Project” or “oral arguments.” Once you subscribe, the podcasts will download to iTunes wherever you use it.

These podcasts contain all of the oral argument audio for a given court or for a search that you create. This means that as of this moment, you can pipe the audio from the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit Courts directly to your pocket with almost no effort.

To learn more about creating custom podcasts or about the podcasts that we already have, we’ve created a page on our site with all the details. It also has information about how to subscribe using Google Music, Stitcher Radio, and other apps.

We hope you’ll enjoy these podcasts. Who doesn’t want the Supreme Court in their pocket?

After months of development, we are thrilled to share a from-scratch re-launch of the RECAP Archive. Our new archive, available immediately at https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/, contains all of the content currently in RECAP and makes it all fully searchable for the first time. At launch, the collection contains information about more than ten million PACER documents, including the extracted text from more than seven million pages of scanned documents.

The new advanced search interface for the RECAP Archive.

The search capabilities of this new system empower researchers in new ways. For example:

• It is now straightforward to search for certain types of documents within our archive of PACER documents. This makes it easy to find examples of motions to dismiss, summary judgements, or any other type of document.

• Researchers can filter by nature of suit, case name, jurisdiction, cause, or one of a number of other fields. Ever wish you could look for examples of certain kinds of documents in your jurisdiction or topic area? Now you can.

• It is now possible to do full-text search within all the documents in a ...

By now most readers of this blog know that PACER brings in a lot of money by selling public domain documents at a dime per page. What people might not realize is how these costs can add up for individual researchers or journalists. Looking through our database, we realized that we have quite a few really big cases.

All of the cases below have more than ten thousand entries that we know about.¹ There are some names you might recognize:

• Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
• In Re: Vioxx Products Liability Litigation
• In Re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig “Deepwater Horizon” SHORT-FORM JOINDERS
• WorldCom, Inc.
• UAL Corporation
• Federal-Mogul Global, Inc., T&N Limited
• Kmart Corporation
• In Re: Chinese-Manufactured Drywall Products Liability Litigation
• FLEMING COMPANIES, INC.
• In Re: FEMA Trailer Formaldehyde Products Liability Litigation
• Tribune Company
• Motors Liquidation Company
• In Re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig “Deepwater Horizon” in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010
• W.R. Grace & Co.
• Circuit City Stores, Inc.
• New Century TRS Holdings, Inc.
• Washington Mutual, Inc.
• Carter Bryant v. Mattel Inc
• G-I Holdings, Inc.
• American Home Mortgage Holdings, Inc.

At the top of the above list is the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy case ...

PACER is the system that the public and various organizations use to access electronic records in the federal district and appeals courts. When PACER is used, it charges for certain activities, like downloading a PDF or making a search query. Raising funds this way was authorized by congress in the E-Government Act to the extent that the revenue paid for running PACER.

In the beginning the revenue from these charges was fairly modest, but the revenue has risen for many years, culminating in revenue of $145M in 2015 (the last year that’s available).

This chart shows the trends in PACER revenue since 1995:

In total, that’s $1.2B that PACER has brought in over 21 years, with an average revenue of $60.7M per year. The average for the last five years is more than twice that — $135.2M/year.¹ These are remarkable numbers and they point to one of two conclusions. Either PACER is creating a surplus — which is illegal according to the E-Government Act — or PACER is costing $135M/year to run.

Whichever the case, it’s clear that something has ...

As most readers of this blog know, PACER is a system run by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO) that hosts over a billion documents from the Federal District and Circuit courts. The system was created in the nineties and was set up with a paywall so that you pay for every “page” of data that you receive. The idea of the fees, as established by the E-Government Act, is that the AO could use them to recoup the cost of running the PACER, but the pricing of the content has always been a bit odd. In my last post I talked about how these fees result in an outrageous cost for PACER data. In this post, I do a deep dive into the core unit of PACER’s pricing and attempt to answer the question, what is a “page” of PACER data?

The size of PACER’s fees has varied over the years, but they’ve always gone up, and they’ve always been assessed roughly as follows:

1. If you download a PDF from PACER, you pay by the page.

2. If you do a search, you pay by the number of search results returned. Because you don’t ...

Recently, we started a new project to analyze a few million PACER documents that we acquired through the RECAP Project. As we began working with the data, one thing we did was count how many pages every document had so that we could calculate the average length of a PDF in PACER. Fairly quickly we learned that based on our sample, the average length of a PACER document is 9.1 pages.¹

Based on a sample of about 2M PDFs, the average length of a PACER document is 9.1 pages. The max (so far) is 4,417.

— RECAP the Law (@RECAPtheLaw) September 2, 2016

This is a really interesting statistic. Another is that there are more than one billion documents in in PACER:

CM/ECF currently contains, in aggregate, more than one billion retrievable documents spread among the 13 courts of appeals, 94 district courts, 90 bankruptcy courts, and other specialized tribunals.

With these two statistics and the knowledge that downloading a document costs ten cents per page, we can once again see how PACER—the biggest paywall the world has ever known—is a deeply troubling system. At this price, purchasing the ...

Iain Carmichael and Michael Kim recently gave a presentation at the PyData Carolinas conference on the topic of Networks and the Law. For their talk they analyzed data from CourtListener, applying a variety of network algorithms to identify important or influential cases.

Here’s the video from the talk:

And their slides are available too.

Abstract

What does network science have to say about the law? Can we determine which are the most the most influential cases in our legal system? Can we understand how legal doctrine evolves? Using tools from network statistics and data provided by Court Listener (an open legal data project), we analyze the network of law case citations.

Citation networks have recently been a topic of interest to network scientists. Court Listener, an open data initiative, provides the network of law case citations as well as the text of (almost every) court case in the US. This network data set provides a rich array of questions that are of interest to legal scholars as well as network scientists.

Can we determine which cases are the most influential in our legal system? Can we understand how legal doctrine evolves? We will discuss what we learned about how ...

We’re getting ready to launch a brand new search engine for PACER content. When it launches, one of the big features it will have is full-text search for the millions of documents that people have submitted using our RECAP system. To our knowledge, this will be the first free system for searching PACER content in this way, allowing you to look up documents by any word they might contain.

The big problem with this goal? We have about a million PDFs that consist only of images. Some of these are actually quite beautiful:

A beautiful handwritten motion. It goes on like this for 46 pages.

But others are hideous:

An 84 page log from 1957. It’s come a long ways just to appear on this blog today.

But no matter how a document looks, we want to extract the text so that we can make it searchable. This is done using a system called Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which looks at each pixel in each page of each document and tries ...

We are happy to share that as of today, oral argument recordings from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals are finally available on CourtListener.com. This means that you can search these recordings, create email alerts for them, listen to them on our site, and even include them in custom podcasts. Of course, we also provide enhanced versions of these recordings for download, and for developers or researchers they’re also available as bulk data or via our APIs.

Before today, we were unable to provide these features for the Second Circuit because they didn’t post their oral argument recordings on their website, so we’re thrilled that they’ve begun doing so. At this point, only the Tenth and Eleventh Circuits do not post their oral argument recordings, but we are hopeful that they will follow the lead of the other circuits and begin doing so soon.

We’re excited to share that as of today, we have added the latest data from the Supreme Court Database (SCDB) into CourtListener. This update adds SCDB ID’s, parallel citations, vote counts, and decision direction data to about 20,000 Supreme Court cases. Each of these enhancements enables some great functionality.

For example, now that we have vote counts for older cases, you can create visualizations of older topics, like the “Separate but Equal” doctrine or the Commerce Clause. Colin Starger, the creator of SCOTUS Mapper, has been working with this early data and has created a variety of fascinating historical Supreme Court network graphs. If you want to experiment with this, the place to start is at the SCOTUS visualization homepage.

Here’s a taste, showing Katz v. U.S. plotted to Olmstead. In this graph you can see that over time the vote went from a divided conservative vote in 1928 to a divided liberal vote in 1967:

The other big enhancement that we’re excited about is that we were able to add about 60,000 parallel citations to the cases we have in CourtListener. This enables our citation parser to find these old citations and ...