August 14, 2009 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...
August 14, 2009 We’re thrilled at the reception RECAP has gotten in its first few hours. Among the notable reactions, Techcrunch discusses the legal issues and concludes that using RECAP doesn’t violate copyright law. RECAP is a hot topic of conversation at Slashdot. CNet also weighed in, highlighting one of the challenges RECAP may face in the coming...
August 17, 2009 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...
August 18, 2009 Of all the questions we’ve received, probably the most common is whether it will be possible to access the documents in our archive without using PACER at all. The answer is yes, but at the moment we don’t offer any good browsing or searching tools. The big reason has to do with privacy. One of our top priorities in developing RECAP was...
August 19, 2009 One way to promote broader public access to the public record is to use RECAP to share documents with others. A complimentary approach is to tell the U.S. Courts directly what should change. Recently, Stanford Law Librarian Erika Wayne launched a petition to “Improve PACER,” which suggested several changes: Provide document authentication...
August 20, 2009 We’ve gotten our first official reaction from the judiciary, in the form of a statement on the New Mexico Bankruptcy court’s website. It contains two important points about the PACER terms of use, and a misleading statement about privacy that we want to correct. First, the good news: the court acknowledges the point we’ve made...
Last week we did a round-up of leading technology-focused sites that have covered RECAP. Now, it seems that news of RECAP is spreading beyond the “tech blogosphere,” as more mainstream publications have begun writing about our software. Foreign Policy‘s Evgeny Morozov covered RECAP, calling it “smart and subversive.” On Wednesday...
September 8, 2009 RECAP co-author Steve Schultze is having a busy month. Last week, he released a new paper called “Electronic Public Access Fees and the United States Federal Courts’ Budget: An Overview.” It provides a comprehensive overview of PACER’s budget. It explains how the courts decide how much to charge for PACER and how the money is spent...
September 30, 2009 Monday’s Los Angeles Times has a great article talking about the growing movement for government transparency. It focuses on three of our favorite transparency advocates: Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation; Josh Tauberer, a regular at CITP conferences, and Carl Malamud, whose non-profit, public.resource.org, is a key RECAP...
Started in 2010, Free Law Project is the leading non-profit using technology, data, and advocacy to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive. We host major open databases of opinions, federal filings, judges, financial disclosures, and oral arguments. We build open‑source tools like eyecite, juriscraper, and x-ray. We rely on your donations for our...