Finishing what Aaron Swartz started with PACER
Much of this is quite uninformed, which makes me question the value of Mr. Foster's other points.> What other options are out there for accessing federal case law?Mr. Foster seems confused. PACER is a system for accessing court dockets, not a repository of case law. You can think of court docket's as a court's "inbox." When the parties file a complaint, motion, or brief, or when the judge issues an interlocutory order or other memorandum, it goes in the docket. Court dockets are mostly concerned with the mechanics of a single case--they are not intended to be a source of law.> Open government pioneer Carl Malamud says commercial ventures such as Lexis-Nexis, West Law, and Bloomberg Law compete for a $6.5 billion market built around extracting rents from this public commons:Mr. Foster completely mischaracterizes what Lexis and West do. These services do not charge you for access to the case law, which are in the public domain. What they do is provide a value-added service on top of the publicly available case law. They have armies of legally-trained professionals who read cases as they come out and annotate them with "head notes" which give summaries of the case and index the case into Lexis's or West's legal ontology. E.g. if I'm thinking of using a case to support a proposition, I can log on to West Law and have it give me a report of all the cases that cite that one. The report not only gives me a simple "citation list" like you can get with Google scholar, but a summary of the contexts in which each case was cited, whether it was referenced in a positive or negative light, and how extensively it was discussed. They can do this because they have (expensive) human readers who go through the cases to generate this meta-data.[1]This is not "extracting rents from the public commons." This is charging for the valuable service of organizing and summarizing publicly available information.There are legitimate complaints about access to case law. While all federal courts that I'm aware of freely post their opinions on their websites (e.g. http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm), the same isn't true for all state courts. But as a practical matter that's a state-by-state issue--the federal government doesn't have much say in the internal administration of the state courts. Going after PACAR while completely ignoring that much more pressing problem smacks of not understanding the underlying issue (to be charitable), or going after the federal system because it's guaranteed to generate more outrage on the internet (to be less charitable).[1] Note that there is a ton of money to be made "disrupting" this industry through automation. To date, nobody has succeeded in building anything close to being as sophisticated as Lexis and Westlaw. Google Scholar is a pale imitation (to the point of not even being the same kind of product) that's only good for doing a bit of quick background research to save time and fees before you log onto Lexis or Westlaw.