We just deleted thousands of court records from our servers because the PACER fee schedule is an unethical racket. A few words in a weekend thread.... We scraped these records for a researcher using a fee waiver they got. According to the fee schedule, any content that you get while using such a waiver cannot be shared. This is the extremely absurd official policy:

There's a lot going on with this bill to enhance judicial security. The Senate Judiciary Committee just voted on it and, yeah, no politician is going to vote against a bill literally named after a judge's horrifically murdered son. But there's cause for concern here. 1/

https://twitter.com/uscourts/status/1466434482362150912

We'd hoped not to get involved with this bill, but it affects us directly. It makes it illegal for a site like CourtListener to post certain kinds of information about judges online. We'd have to start taking down information if this passed (or fighting @uscourts in court). 2/

Today is a two-steps-forward-one-step-back day for the Judiciary. They finally took our 2017 advice and established a policy for good guys to report security problems in their websites. This is really good — in principle, anyway. uscourts.gov/news/2021/10/1… The general idea is that online systems are always under attack, so you want to encourage good hackers by saying things like:
1. These are the rules for trying to break our stuff
2. If you break those rules, here's what we'll do
3. If you don't break those rules, you're a friend

Four years in the making, today we are announcing a new one-of-a-kind database containing the investment and conflict information for every federal judge. Spanning 17 years, this database was extracted from over 250,000 pages of judicial financial records. free.law/2021/09/28/ann… In tandem with developing this new data, we collaborated with a team of investigative journalists at The Wall Street Journal.

They spent the past several months diving into the data. The first of their groundbreaking reports is out today: wsj.com/articles/131-f…

Big new feature today: Tagging! You can now use tags on CourtListener to create private or public collections of dockets! courtlistener.com/help/tags/ We plan to allow you to tag documents or other resources soon. At launch you can tag dockets however you please, and then create detailed webpages for your tags. The help text has the details: courtlistener.com/help/tags/

The judicial branch commissioned @18F to do an 11-week study of PACER/CM/ECF. The result is a monumental leap forward in the effort to fix the PACER problem. Finally, we have some details about what's happening with this vital resource. A few notes…

https://twitter.com/waldojaquith/status/1397229419169734657

First, if you're in the legal, technology, or government space, you should read this thing. From technology to contracting to how PACER/CM/ECF works, we've never seen so many best practices in one place. Dip this document in bronze so it'll last forever: free.law/pdf/pacer-path…

The House Judicial Committee just came out strongly in favor of the "Free PACER" bill. The quotes are just incredible. We'll put some here.... Nadler: "Judiciary records systems have long lagged behind modern standards of accessibility and openness."

"It is a disservice that in today's digital age the public's access to public records and public proceedings is so resource-intensive and burdensome."