Yesterday, along with Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, I had the privilege of presenting to the FOIA Advisory Committee to the Archivist of the United States. He presented on the topic of what public access, FOIA-like laws might look like in the Legislative Branch, while I focused on the Judicial Branch.

To prepare for this meeting, I spoke with a number of FOIA and transparency experts to get their perspectives on and concerns about such a law. The general thrust of those conversations led to two major points that I made in my presentation:

1. We need more transparency from the Judicial Branch

Currently, the Judicial Branch responds to record requests under the Common Law Right of Access doctrine. This approach, established by English Parliament in 1372 and hence inherited by the United States, is essentially the default access that the public has when seeking records. In theory, it provides a balance between the public’s need for transparency and the government’s need for privacy or secrecy.

The Common Law Right to Inspect and Copy Judicial Records: In Camera or On Camera, 16 GA. L. REV. 659 (1982).

Unfortunately, the Common Law Right …

A few weeks ago I had the privilege and the pleasure of speaking at the Michigan Association of Law Librarians (MichALL) annual conference. The talk I gave was an overview of Free Law Project and all of our projects, initiatives, and advocacy. Here are the slides from that presentation.

If you only watch one video about using the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, make it this video by Free Law Project’s Brian Carver: “Using PACER: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”

The video provides a demonstration of what a regular member of the public might experience trying to find a copy of a recent newsworthy federal district court opinion on the court’s website and through the federal PACER system. This example was genuinely chosen because Brian himself had heard about a recent newsworthy case out of the District Court for the District of Maryland. In fact, we’re fairly sure that other examples might cast these sites in an even worse light.

Free Law Project believes that Congress should provide adequate funding to the federal courts so that the financial argument for PACER’s fees would be moot and everyone could agree that public access to court records should be free. But even in the absence of that, we conclude from this demonstration that the non-document related fees in PACER for search results and reports that are charged without an interstitial warning of their magnitude are particularly onerous and should be abolished. The courts …

Video of Brian Carver’s talk at Stanford Law School on January 16, 2014, entitled “It is Long Past Time for Free Online Access to the Law: Free Law Project.”

The Law Via the Internet conference is celebrating its 20th anniversary at Cornell University on October 7-9th. I will be attending, and with any luck, I’ll be presenting on the topic proposed below.

Wrangling Court Data on a National Level

Access to case law has recently become easier than ever: By simply visiting a court’s website it is now possible to find and read thousands of cases without ever leaving your home. At the same time, there are nearly a hundred court websites, many of these websites suffer from poor funding or prioritization, and gaining a higher-level view of the law can be challenging. “Juriscraper” is a new project designed to ease these problems for all those that wish to collect these court opinions daily. The project is under active development, and we are looking for others to get involved.

Juriscraper is a liberally-licensed open source library that can be picked up and used by any organization to scrape the case data from court websites. In addition to a simply scraping the websites and extracting metadata from them, Juriscraper has a number of other design goals:

• Extensibility to support video, oral argument audio, and other media types
• Support …

On March 17, 2011, Steve Schultze participated in an ABA webinar on public access to court records and the related privacy implications. You can download the MP3 of the webinar. You can also download the written materials.

On February 15, Steve and Tim spoke at New York Law School on “PACER, RECAP, and Free Law.” Video of the event is below:

On Tuesday June 22, Harlan Yu will be on Capitol Hill speaking to Congressional Staffers at an event sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Transparency. The event is called Transparency Made Easy: How to Make the Government More Open and Accountable. It is open only to staffers, but the Sunlight Foundation will post video of the event afterward.

On Friday the 25th, both Harlan and Steve will be at the 20th Annual CALI Conference in Camden NJ, explaining how “Capturing PACER for Open Access” can benefit the cause of legal education.

Update: The video and other materials from the Transparency Caucus are now available. You can watch Harlan’s remarks below:

Last week RECAP’s Steve Schultze and Harlan Yu visited Yale Law School to give a talk sponsored by Yale’s Information Society Project. Yale librarian Jason Eiseman produced a short interview with Steve that he describes as “a little Blair Witch.” Steve talks about the origins of RECAP, discusses some of the current challenge faced by RECAP, and talks briefly about RECAP’s newest sister project, FedThread.

RECAP co-author Steve Schultze is having a busy month. Last week, he released a new paper called “Electronic Public Access Fees and the United States Federal Courts’ Budget: An Overview.” It provides a comprehensive overview of PACER’s budget. It explains how the courts decide how much to charge for PACER and how the money is spent. It’s an invaluable roadmap for anyone interested in understanding the debate over PACER’s future.

Today, Steve is at the Gov 2.0 Expo giving a talk about RECAP. If you’re at the expo as well, we hope you’re planning to go to the talk, which starts at 10:50. If not, you can see a pre-recorded version of his talk here:

Finally, next week Steve will start his new job as associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, which is the home of RECAP and its other co-authors. The rest of the RECAP team is excited that we’ll soon have Steve as a colleague as well as a co-author.