Crowdsourcing Court Records

Last week I made a visit to the District of Columbia's federal courthouse to look up some documents for a story I've been working on. Since I don't have an account for the federal court records database known as PACER, heading down to the courthouse was the only way I could download and print the records I needed at a cost of eight cents per page. I sat down and dutifully printed out the first lengthy set of documents, only to find that somehow all of the text printed out backwards on the page.

The second computer printed correctly, but proved slow and unresponsive. What I thought would be a relatively straightforward task ended up consuming much of my afternoon. I was told users with accounts can access the records online, but even then the records are not searchable, making navigation time consuming and difficult.

PACER has been in place since 1988, so it's hardly surprising that it feels a little dated. The larger issue is that citizens looking for information that should be publicly available online must instead travel to the nearest federal court house and print out the documents at their own expense. But a new project from two researchers at Princeton University may help make court records much more accessible without any charge to the taxpayer or the government:

A new project by a couple of researchers at Princeton University may be the next shining example of citizen ingenuity improving government. Researchers Tim Lee and Harlan Yu have developed a way to get at the holy grail of court records, turning the glacially slow, palatially expensive retrieval process into a fast, free one.

So how do they make court records available quickly and without charging any fees? The answer is surprisingly simple and fairly brilliant:

The workaround they created, which comes as a free plug-in for the web browser Firefox, is the reverse of PACER, all the way down to its name: RECAP.

The principle behind RECAP is simple. Every time a legit user of PACER downloads a document for 8 cents, a copy of the document is added to the free internet archive. Once there it is reformatted, labeled and made searchable for the next person who needs the information.

My colleague Aliya Sternstein wrote about RECAP a couple weeks ago and explored the topic of public access to federal court documents at length. I highly recommend the story if you're interested in learning more about the topic.

Federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra has talked at length about the need for the government to "democratize data" and allow the public greater access to the information that is the basis for most government policies. The RECAP project at Princeton is an excellent example of two members of the public taking it upon themselves to make that data public. Hopefully the federal court system will realize the value of such a program and provide RECAP with access to all of their records, rather than forcing it to collect them individually, saving the taxpayer eight cents at a time.