Transparency is a fundamental principle of our legal system. Since the
1980s, the cutting edge of judicial transparency has been PACER, an
electronic system that allows attorneys and the general public to access
millions of federal court records. PACER was a big step forward when it
was originally created, but lately it has begun to show its age. At a
time when the other two branches of government are becoming ever more
subject to online scrutiny, the judicial branch still requires citizens
to provide a credit card and pay eight cents a page for its documents.
For reasons we detail on our “Why It Matters”
page, we think this needs
to change, and the sooner the better.
Today we’re excited to release the public beta of RECAP. RECAP is an
extension to the popular Firefox web
browser that gives PACER users a
hassle-free way to contribute to a free, open repository of federal
court records. When a RECAP user purchases a document from PACER, the
RECAP extension helps her automatically send a copy of that document to
the RECAP archive. And RECAP saves its users money by notifying them
when documents they’re searching for are already available for free from
the public archive.
RECAP is a project of the Center for Information Technology
Policy at Princeton University. It was
developed by Harlan Yu, Steve
Schultze, and Timothy B.
Lee, under the supervision of
Prof. Ed Felten. Some of the key
ideas that inspired RECAP are described in this
paper, written by Harlan, Ed, and two
of their colleagues.
The RECAP repository is hosted by the Internet
Archive, a world-renowned online
library. With the help of RECAP users, we want to build the nation’s
most comprehensive public archive of freely-available federal judicial
records. And we’re looking for partners to help us build the archive
more quickly and find new, innovative uses for the information. We are
already working with Justia and
public.resource.org to integrate the
public records they already have into our archive.
The video at the right provides a quick demonstration of RECAP in
action. Our about page answers
some common questions about RECAP. If you’re convinced that you’d like
to be a RECAP beta tester, please check out our privacy
policy and then head to [our homepage][/recap/] to get
started. With your help, we can make the dream of free public access to
court records a reality.
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