We’ve been getting a ton of helpful feedback from users over the
weekend. We’re grateful for all the supportive emails, comments, and
tweets we’ve received. We’re also grateful for the bug reports and
feature requests we’ve gotten. We need this kind of feedback to make
RECAP better.
Most of the questions we’ve received are are now answered by our
Frequently Asked Questions. Stay tuned for some upcoming
blog posts where we’ll address some of these questions in more detail.
But first, we wanted to highlight some more of the commentary that
RECAP’s release has generated.
James Grimmelmann, a law professor at New York Law School who has done
some great
writing
on public access to the law, gives RECAP this generous
endorsement:
The great part about this is that because the Archive is providing the
server space for free, every RECAP user is saving the court system
work. Each time you download through RECAP, you avoid having to go
through PACER’s servers at all. So yes, RECAP will mean a decrease in
PACER’s revenues, but it also means a decrease in the things those
revenues need to pay for. It’s an all-around good thing. It saves
attorneys, researchers, and citizens money. It saves the government
computer resources. And it makes the law just a little bit more free
and accessible.
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Ryan Singel of Wired calls RECAP “a pretty good
hack,”
and urges the judiciary to drop its paywall. The Lawyerist blog
says
that RECAP is a “brilliantly-conceived tool to liberate public records
from PACER.”
RECAP seems to be especially popular among law librarians. Erika Wayne,
a law librarian at Stanford University,
writes
of RECAP: “Be impressed. Very impressed.” We also got a favorable
write-up from the University of Wisconsin law
library
and a mention from the Georgetown law
library.
RECAP is also popular among DC-area think tanks. Heather West at the
Center for Democracy and Technology
calls
RECAP “exactly the kind of project that we need” to promote judicial
transparency. Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason
University, an early
advocate of
online transparency,
calls
RECAP “ingenious.” And we got a
mention
from Jim Harper of the Cato Institute.
Finally, we were particularly happy to get
coverage
from the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal blog. Practicing lawyers
are the heaviest users of PACER, so it’s extremely helpful to have RECAP
covered by influential legal publications.
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