Re: Hyperlaw on open access to district court filings

[Carl Malamud <xxxx@media.org>]

The argument is great ... Connecticut Law Tribune did a piece about  
this and I was very effusive ... what Alan proposes is what the courts  
should do.  But, I'm skeptical of that actually happening.  The big  
problem is that we don't have standing as ordinary citizens.  We can  
be as right as we want, but if you're not named "Your Honor", you  
don't have a seat at the table.  And, so far at least, none of them  
has got a clue.

But, if we proxy pacer and other primary legal materials on the  
Internet, I think we will have a very effective voice because then we  
have eyeballs.

I'm glad Alan is doing what he is doing, just as I was glad that Jamie  
Love did what he did on EDGAR, Patent, and other databases.  But, I'd  
rather go look for a large stack of tapes, DVDs, or other raw data or  
go harvest some database on the net.  $0.02.

Carl

On Sep 12, 2008, at 2:50 PM, Stephen Schultze wrote:

> He does, however, seem to be making a good argument with respect to  
> the fact that inconsistent ad-hoc systems by the individual courts  
> to publish their opinions are far inferior to a fairly simple  
> modification to CM/ECF/PACER that simply provided free public  
> access.  Notably, the argument here is only for free public access  
> to the *opinions* and not the full set of case documents.  He is  
> right that although in theory one should be able to access recent  
> opinions for free via PACER, many of the documents are not flagged  
> as such and thus incur charges.