LANSING, Mich.—A large crowd and their canine companions covered the steps of the State Capitol Thursday morning for a rally in support of House Bill 4849, known as Queenie’s Law, which would outlaw painful dog experiments at public institutions in Michigan. Bill sponsor Rep. Matt Koleszar joined speakers from the national medical ethics group the Physicians...
Michael Lissner and Colin MacArthur April 29, 2024 Over the last few weeks, we’ve been on a listening tour with the many admirable organizations who advance access to justice through technology, and want to improve court systems and processes. In line with our commitments to openness and transparency, we’re sharing what we have learned. Across 16...
June 19, 2009 The right of access to criminal trials in particular is properly afforded protection by the First Amendment both because such trials have historically been open to the press and public and because such right of access plays a particularly significant role in the functioning of the judicial process and the government as a whole. — Globe Newspaper Co. v...
August 14, 2009 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...
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...