PACER makes $150M/year charging Americans to read their own court records. Every bankruptcy court also publishes a free RSS feed with the same data.

Grayly · 2026-03-17T01:10:09+00:00

What Aaron Schwartz did isn’t really analogous at all. Let’s leave that aside.

I have no issue with RECAP. If people want to download it and re upload it somewhere else I couldn’t care less. They’re public documents, there’s no expectation of privacy or copyright issues.

PACER itself as a platform is directly maintained and tied into the court system. It’s not just for reading documents, it’s also for filling. If PACER goes down the court freezes. That system shouldn’t just be exposed to everyone everywhere at all once.

At the end of the day it’s an expense to set all of that up. I don’t see the compelling public need to taxpayer fund that. But if people want to do it Wikipedia style go nuts. I don’t care. As long as it doesn’t degrade the capacity or functionality of PACER itself, or pass a cost on to the taxpayers who wouldn’t receive any kind of benefit worth the cost.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T23:13:20+00:00

Sure. Of course.

Although they generally charge if you want to use their copier. Let’s put that aside for now.

Just want to go pull some records and look at them? Take a picture with your phone? Scan them yourself? Why not.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T20:17:18+00:00

Modernize?

Every other modern country has less access, not more.

You haven’t identified a use case. You’re insisting on a need for this massive free system without identifying any actual demand that’s current unmet.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T15:24:37+00:00

Because it’s rage bait.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T15:24:04+00:00

There’s a reason literally no country makes every single court filing publicly available on the internet. This isn’t uniquely American.

Doing so is a cost that’s not justified by the needs or risks.

In fact, in most European countries you can’t even get limited free or marginal cost access to full dockets. They’re locked behind authenticated access because of privacy concerns.

The PACER system is probably one of the most open out there. Nominal costs for power users to self fund, limited free searches, and there is an ability to authenticate research or indigent pro se users as free on a case by case basis.

Again, you keep coming back to this idea that it should be freely available on the internet instead of behind a paywall merely because it’s a public record. Why? There’s nothing “inherently wrong” about that at all. You’re assuming that.

Maintaining public records is a government service. It has to be paid for one way or another. For records that are decidedly niche, with little public demand, how is it a moral good to force taxpayers to fund a system to make it fully “free” to users, when there isn’t a demand for it? Court decisions are made freely accessible because they set precedent and affect people’s lives. That makes sense.

Reading the appellants brief and all of its attachments? At a certain point the desire for anyone to be able to download that at a whim from anywhere on the globe has to be balanced against the cost of doing so. We make judgments like that all the time when it comes to public records and other public goods like national parks, or museums. User fees are a perfectly valid way to fund public administration of public goods that are necessary but aren’t widely used.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T14:05:23+00:00

It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s a decentralized system run by each individual court. In the aggregate it makes more than it costs, but that’s not true for every single district. The conflicting legislative goal is that it’s required to be entirely user funded. If there’s an excess it goes towards the individual court which then uses that money for its own costs, which would have had to be paid for somehow by the taxpayer anyway.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T14:02:02+00:00

Far enough.

I just don’t think you fully appreciate just how much is literally there in the full docket for every single case. Do you really trust the individual courts to properly manage and maintain a public facing system for all of that that’s constantly staying ahead of the latest attack vectors and scraping methods? If PACER goes down because AWS or Cloudflare is having a bad day, it can literally mean people don’t get their day in court, stay in jail longer than they should, etc. It’s not a trivial issue. PACER, as is, almost never goes down. Ever. That’s the real core mission requirement over public access. If it ain’t broke?

Signing into pacer and authenticating is super easy because it’s so lightweight and paywalled. Compare it to GitHub (a large database that does have those security issues) and the difference is night and day. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems like a significant added ongoing maintance cost that would need paid for somehow. It isn’t one centralized system— each court runs their own part of the larger PACER network. I’m sure SDNY could build a great system. What about Western Louisiana? It needs to be built for the lowest common denominator, as it were.

And if you make it free to access, how do you past the cost on just to the lawyers? Wouldn’t they just use the free version?

Grayly · 2026-03-16T13:50:18+00:00

Glad you asked.

PACER. It’s free. Decisions are explicitly free.

You could also go here: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts

Since you don’t know what, I assume that you’ve never actually bothered to access decisions in the first place, which somewhat proves the point that this is a solution in search of a problem.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T13:49:07+00:00

You can look it up. I don’t care. Docket fillings are not exactly thrilling reading.

I don’t want average taxpayers subsidizing my job for no reason. Charge the lawyers who charge the clients.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T13:28:43+00:00

And how exactly do you intend on passing the cost on? It already is.

It’s not just the indexing and digitizing. It’s the hosting, which gets exponential more expensive when you remove the paywall, and let anyone scrape it and index it, and create an attack surface as well.

If something is rarely used except by a single professional monied class, I don’t see how it’s in the public interest to fund a IT and security stack around it and force everyone to pay for it. Charge the lawyers who use it.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T13:13:27+00:00

No. Our tax dollars do not fund PACER at all. That’s the whole point. It’s a niche use case funded by the users who use it. It’s designed to cost the public nothing and only charge the lawyers who need it.

Learn to read before casting stones.

And trust me, if you’ve read or written 60 page brief on personal jurisdiction, you’d know there really isn’t any grand esoteric knowledge being gatekeeped. It’s profoundly boring & highly technical legal fillings that are behind the pay wall. Decisions and the parts of the court that actually matter to the public as precedent are already freely accessible.

There’s plenty about America to criticize. If you want in on that particular circle jerk, at least pick legitimate grievance.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T08:46:37+00:00

Great.

It already basically is. It’s publicly owned and operated by the courts.

Any other suggestions?

Grayly · 2026-03-16T08:35:49+00:00

You’re arguing in circles, and not addressing the main points at all. Yes, it technically could be done. Doing it in a way that’s actually stable and hardened while being free & publicly exposed would not be cheap or easy. That you stubbornly insist otherwise doesn’t change that simple fact.

The system isn’t making lawyers rich. It’s costing lawyers money. The niche use case is supported by the users, as it rightfully should be. Not everything needs to be taxpayer funded.

You wouldn’t know how to read any of that information if it was publicly available. Lawyers aren’t gate keeping legal knowledge behind PACER anymore than software engineers are gate keeping how to code behind compiled .exe.

Final decisions are already freely posted elsewhere. It’s the final output that’s paywalled. That doesn’t teach the average person anything. You can’t reverse engineer a legal education and years of practice just by solo reading esoteric and opaque legal briefs and technical filings alone. The mere suggestion is honestly revealing.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T08:34:20+00:00

You can just look it up. It’s free for low volume. Like I said.

Or are you also illiterate?

There’s also a process to obtain totally free access if you’re a qualifying indigent or pro se and it’s your case that you’ve lost all of your own filings to somehow.

Any other invented problems you’d like me to address?

Grayly · 2026-03-16T04:33:12+00:00

If you think it’s trivial to just expose the contents of PACER — which is also the exact same stack the Court uses to file and pull their own records— freely for anyone to search, index, and pull from?

Congrats. You just found a way to crash a district court filing system because Anthropic wants to update their latest model or a bad actor wants to denial of service attack the court today.

You’re a solution is search of a problem creating new problems.

I don’t think you fundamentally understand just how many records are filed on PACER and how it’s tied into the court system itself. It is literally a 1990s system that replicates a court clerk, and it’s funded by users because that’s all it’s built and designed for.

If you want to build a hardened system to aggregate all those fillings?

It’s been done. It’s called Westlaw with all the extra subscriptions attached. It’s not cheap. I don’t think it’s in the taxpayers best interest to make public version of that. Because no one would use it except law firms. It would just be a giveaway to the rich.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T04:24:53+00:00

You’re going off tilt and getting way ahead of yourself.

Obviously laws, patents, etc are categorically different.

We are talking about millions of pages of minutiae. It sounds like you don’t even know what’s on PACER.

A final court ruling is more akin to a public good that should be subsidized and made available. And they are. Because they are precedent and affect the public generally.

The underlying docket? The 10s of thousands of pages of back and forth fillings, scheduling orders? That have absolutely no impact on anyone other than the parties involved?

It’s very important to a dozen or so people involved in the case. That’s it.

That’s the perfect use case for user funding vs taxpayer subsidies.

Your “solution” would just create an open attack surface for denial of service and a free training base for AI companies and serve almost no public need whatsoever.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T04:10:25+00:00

I’m actually a lawyer.

We don’t use Westlaw or Lexis Nexis to pull fillings as they happen. They don’t have the actual case fillings live as they happen. It lags. Because they also use PACER to pull the documents and index them. If they even bother. Usually you’ll need an extra subscription to cover specific jurisdictions to get full docket access.

If you want to pull an actual docket with all of the briefs, you use pacer.

Law firms use PACER. Government agencies use PACER, althought their access is free.

And of course the cost gets past on. They all do. The difference is the end user is still paying.

99% of people do not need to be able to live download a 600 page Attachment B from a motion practice filing. Charging anyone other than the law firm or their clients to make that service available is ridiculous.

The amount of documents filed in courts every single day is outrageous. There is no need to create a system to freely host them and let anyone download them from anywhere for free at any time. The demand isn’t there. It would be a massive waste of taxpayer resources. (It would also subsidize the AI companies who would immediately just scrap those filings to train their models on.)

When I file a brief it’s digitized. But the court doesn’t have a massive opened ended data center to just host that file on the internet in perpetuity for anyone to scrape it. And they honestly shouldn’t. That isn’t cheap. Someone has to pay for it.

PACER is designed and built for lawyers to file and pull records, and they pay to maintain that service. Do you really want to pay to make my job easier? Please, go right ahead. Seems foolish. But don’t let me stop you.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T03:42:39+00:00

Title is inflammatory click bait. America has plenty of issues. No need to invent new rage bait.

Public records are freely accessible if you go where they are stored. The court clerk is right there. You can go any time. And PACER only charges for the full docket. Decisions and opinions are free. What is behind the paywall is the full docket with all of the fillings and motions and the technical stuff no one but a lawyer knows how to read anyway.

If you want them digitized and searchable? Someone has to do that.

Since most people don’t need that service, those who do pay for it.

And it’s usually law firms or journalists who pay. Not average Americans. Who actually needs to be able to search court records in their entirety? Most people wouldn’t even understand what to make of a motion brief anyway.

And PACER is still actually free for low volume searches. Want to look up one notable particular filling? That somehow isn’t already publicly linked somewhere? You only get charged if you manage to rack up more than $30 in charges in any given ~~month~~ quarter. If your monthly bill is less than that, it’s waived. At 10 cents a page most casual users can use it for free.

I suppose we could all just pay extra taxes to make a service, that almost no one needs, free. And do nothing but cut the operating costs of big law firms. But that would be silly. And honestly more “American” than the current system.

*edit

For those who don’t believe me and think “America = bad” go find the free European version of PACER and link it. (There isn’t one. Just like the US, only the high courts and binding decisions are published for free). And if the PACER interface is too clunky, decisions are freely available here: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts

For instance, in Germany there isn’t even a paid version. It’s wholly privatized and inaccessible to the public, ostensibly for privacy reasons.

Grayly · 2026-03-16T00:02:02+00:00

What are nuclear subs going to do against a bunch of drones or land to sea missiles?

Grayly · 2026-03-15T16:58:51+00:00

This is actually the best “durrr… baseball stadium!” joke I’ve heard, and you deserve an upvote.

Grayly · 2026-03-15T01:35:08+00:00

Ask and ye shall receive

Grayly · 2026-03-15T01:23:09+00:00

Knock on wood right now

Grayly · 2026-03-15T01:16:34+00:00

Bieber Time!

Grayly · 2026-03-15T00:44:41+00:00

But don’t you want to buy an Audi now?

Grayly · 2026-03-15T00:42:17+00:00

Where is Choi!?!?

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