Making Court Archives Available to All

From the New York Times, “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy”:

For those search­ing for fed­eral court deci­sions, briefs and other legal papers, there is no Google. Instead, there is Pacer, the government-​​run Public Access to Court Electronic Records sys­tem designed in the bygone days of screechy tele­phone modems. Cumbersome, arcane and not free, it is every­thing that Google is not. Recently, how­ever, a small group of ded­i­cated open-​​government activists teamed up to push the court records sys­tem into the 21st cen­tury — by sim­ply grab­bing enor­mous chunks of the data­base and giv­ing the doc­u­ments away, to the great annoy­ance of the government.

This lack of access has always rubbed me the wrong way. The courts are a pub­lic sys­tem and the records ought to be open and acces­si­ble. Plus, old archaic sys­tems com­monly used in the legal research arena are sim­ply not as effec­tive at pro­vid­ing quick and ready access to infor­ma­tion as more mod­ern search engines devel­oped for the Internet at large. This appears to be true despite the greater focus and speci­ficity pos­si­ble with search sys­tems ded­i­cated to legal topics.

On the other hand, there is a real prob­lem of pri­vacy issues in many court fil­ings. But sim­ply rely­ing on “hid­ing” pro­tected and pri­vate infor­ma­tion behind obscu­rity is no pro­tec­tion. Courts, clerks and lawyers need to make sure to redact pri­vate infor­ma­tion accord­ing to court rules (such as social secu­rity num­bers, data on chil­dren, and so on).