In our last post, we
mentioned that we were already working with other
organizations that support judicial transparency to help us build the public
repository that lies at RECAP’s foundation. Public.resource.org, led by Carl
Malamud, has been especially helpful in this regard. They have
a vast repository of court
documents, weighing in at more than 500 gigabytes in total. Over the last few
weeks we’ve been pre-stocking the archive with these documents, and we recently
crossed the million document threshold.
What this means is that installing RECAP will not only help you
contribute to government transparency, but it’s likely to start saving
you money right out of the gate. For example, if you practice law in New
York City, you’ll be happy to know that we have 238,098 documents from
the Southern District of New York. If you have RECAP installed, you can
use PACER the way you normally do, and RECAP will automatically inform
you if the document you need is already available for free.
Here is a table of the other courts where we have a significant number
of documents:
Court No. of Documents
District of Alaska 52,797
Northern District of California 190,470
District of the District of Columbia 219,049
District of Delaware 182,900
Central District of Illinois 21,378
District of Massachusetts 217,315
Southern District of New York 238,098
Eastern District of Pennsylvania 20,530
We anticipate importing about a million more documents from
Public.resource.org in the coming weeks. The good folks at
Justia have also expressed interest in
contributing to the repository.
Unfortunately, even after we import all the documents from these
organizations, we will still be several million documents short of our
goal of a comprehensive, free repository of court records. That’s where
you come in. By installing the RECAP public
beta, you can make an important
contribution to the goal of free public access for all.
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