More on briefs and copyright

Copyrighted Legal Briefs Continued - Law Librarian Blog, 2-27-2012.

FedCtRecords App

FedCtRecords is a mobile app for users to access their PACER accounts and locate federal court records and search the following information:

-Attorney Information
-Party Information
-Deadlines and Hearings
-Case Summary
-Dockets

The app is free to download for a limited time only.

PACER fees increasing

Ars Technica reports that PACER fees will increase from $.08 per page to $.10 per page. See also: Conference Approves Standards & Procedures for Sealing Civil Cases, USCourts.gov.

Judicial Conference Approves PACER Fee Increase

The Judicial Conference announced an approval to increase fees to access PACER:

"The Conference....authorized an increase in the Judiciary's electronic public access fee in response to increasing costs for maintaining and enhancing the electronic public access system. The increase in the electronic public access (EPA) fee, from $.08 to $.10 per page, is needed to continue to support and improve the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, and to develop and implement the next generation of the Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Filing system."

Read more from Cicely Wilson of Justia

New Pilot Program to Access Federal Decisions

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Federal Judiciary have launched a one-year pilot program to offer federal court decisions via Federal Digital System, FDsys.

Through FDsys you are able to search, browse, access and download government documents.

For now the courts participating in the pilot include:

1. U.S. Courts of Appeals for the second and eighth circuits


2. District Courts
   Minnesota
   Maryland
   Rhode Island
   Idaho
   Kansas
   Northern District of New York
   Northern District of Alabama


3. Bankruptcy Courts -
   Southern District of New York
   Southern District of Florida
   District of Maine

Of course, you can access court decisions from PACER at no cost.

PACER Case Locator

Pacer Case Locator is the new interface for accessing PACER records. It has some very useful capabilities. There are the basic and the advanced search screens, topped with tabs for searching all courts, appellate courts only, bankruptcy courts only, civil courts only, criminal courts only, and multi-district litigation. The advanced search screen provides searching by case title, i.e., John Doe. Party name searching is still available, i.e., Doe, John.

With the appellate and the civil tabs, you can do nature of suit searching, and set time boundaries.

There are two interesting links at the very top of the screen. First is the Court Information, which shows the court code, the earliest cases and the most recent cases. Second is the Statistics tab, which has 8 pre-formatted report segments, with multiple reports behind each segment. Prices, number of pages, file type (txt or xls), with a download link are clearly displayed.

1. Request lists of cases for a specified date range by court type


2. Conduct searches based on chapter, discharge date and dismissal date for bankruptcy cases


3. Access case information for the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation


4. Choose result formats, including HTML, delimited text, and XML which can be easily imported to other programs for analysis


5. Change the sort order of the results displayed


6. Conduct refined searches within the results of a previous search
   

The web address for PACER case locator is http://pcl.uscourts.gov/.

Attached is a screen shot of the advanced web searching panel.

Article about PACER

You can't live with PACER, you can't live without PACER, it seems. The Ars Technica web site has posted an article that asks why PACER is still behind a "paywall" and not allowing free public dissemination of dockets and filings. It's an interesting view of the whole idea of paying for court records. The comments are pretty interesting too, with several bringing up online vendors trying to make searches easier, but at a steeper cost.

The case against PACER: tearing down the courts' paywall
US law says that federal court records are in the public domain. So why do the courts still lock most of their official documents behind a paywall? Ars investigates.
By Timothy B. Lee
Last updated April 8, 2009 11:30 PM CT

Paper on PACER by Peter W. Martin of Cornell Law School

Online Access to Court Records - from Documents to Data, Particulars to Patterns
was posted today to the Social Science Research Network. It is located at:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1107412

Abstract: For over a decade the public has had remote access to federal court records held in electronic format, including documents filed by litigants and judicial rulings. First available via dial-up connections, access migrated to the Web in 1998. That and a succession of other improvements to the federal "Public Access to Court Electronic Records" system or PACER prompted the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to proclaim in 2001 that "the advancement of technology has brought the citizen ever closer to the courthouse." Unquestionably, what the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and Judicial Conference of the United States have built offers citizens, businesses, journalists, and scholars unprecedented access to the details of individual court proceedings. But to hold PACER in that frame is to miss much of its impact. Moreover, some of the gains one might hope or expect to flow from enhanced judicial transparency remain largely untouched by this system. The article explores PACER's evolution, larger impact, and unrealized possibilities. It then proceeds to examine why state courts are, in general, approaching online access to court records so differently.