[1]: https://free.law/
Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently.
FOIA: IL Judicial system isn't FOIAable. There's a "data request" process that you can go down, but last time I tried by requesting through the chief judge of Cook County, they told me to request the data from the Clerk of Courts. The Clerk of Courts told me I need to speak to the chief judge's office. That went on for 6 months. The docket-level data I've seen from them is... beyond indecipherable. Literally never seen a dataset so indecipherable in my life -- a combination of esoteric codes, hidden encoding schemes, and length-delimited lines.
Court docs: Gotta go downtown if you're not a lawyer or if you're not a "criminal justice partner" to get any, then you have to print them (don't print past 4 or you'll get yelled at). Some journalists have access, but the IL Supreme Court's policies disallow journalists from getting it. So we have a system where only some journalists get access to court documents and fuck everyone else, I guess.
Civil Asset Forfeiture cases: the courts and state's attorneys do everything in their part to separate it from the initiating criminal case. So peoples' cars are being taken by the cops under dubious constitutional grounds and they can't get it back until the criminal case is over. And I've yet to find a consistent way to figure out the initiating criminal case tied to a civil asset forfeiture. I've yet to find anything like a policy doc that says it's intentional to obfuscate the criminal case from the civil case, but I can't think of any reason why it would be like this if it wasn't intentional. FOIA through the State's Attorney? Nah, they don't respond, or they give nonsense denials that require litigation.
I could go on, but. Fuck. It's bad out there and it hides so much suffering. I highly encourage folk to give court watching a try. You'll be shocked how much you'll learn.
So basically you have no fucking idea what the law actually is, how it's being enforced, what will happen to you if you don't follow their interpretation, and god forbid you wind up there they can use a lot of methods to keep you from talking about it.
Reclaim the Records and I do a loooot of the same work but it's separate enough that we don't really interact much. But I'm a big, big fan of their work and have had a couple light chats with the founder a couple times. She's great and yeah, wonderfully aggressive. Her work's the sort of foundational work that enables so much.
Muckrock and I go back quite a long way! Sending about 200 requests through them later this month :)
Love the Muckrock love, they are a treasure.
Lucy Parsons Labs: https://www.lucyparsonslabs.com/donate
Chicago Appleseed: https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/ways-to-give/
Invisible Institute: https://invisible.institute/donate
Unraveled Press: https://unraveledpress.com/support-unraveled/
All four are great. One is my employer. Unraveled Press would benefit the most from donations.
Is this because a person has to literally transcribe the stenographer's notes into plain English? Is it expensive because it is labor intensive?
Then every single case needs to have all PII redacted before it is made searchable, but that is a different story.
And certainly something that would only have to be done once...
(disability accomodations is a different conversation altogether)
That doesn't sound right, are you sure that wasn't a bribe?
"Out of curiosity, is it normal to pay court reporters over venmo like this? To be honest I was pretty surprised when I heard this. And funny enough when I asked folk on twitter, a scammer tried to "help out" with some "scam recovery" service for $500."
"That's hilarious! Since the pandemic, it really took off because we were working remotely, and some of the Cook County judges and reporters remain remote to this day and may be permanently working on Zoom. I work at 26th Street so we've worked through most of the pandemic in person, but the courthouse was not open to the public. Zelle is a way you can get payment to us quickly to get your transcript faster.
Most private attorneys use Zelle now because they want the reporter to start transcription sooner rather than later, but we also accept checks or if you prefer to send a check in the mail, you can do that. Very rarely does an attorney come into our office these days.
It's just a matter of preference."I've been frustrated by this stuff for many years, and come to the sad conclusion that corruption in American public life is simply endemic. Lawmakers could and should prioritize the public availability of public legislative and judicial proceedings, but habitually choose not to, preferring obfuscation over clarity.
I buy into Plato's concept (sometimes attributed to Tactitus) that 'the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.'
https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...
1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to learn that Royal Mail is no longer a public institution, it was sold against public will by the UK government to a private entity, and sold again and as of last year it is owned by a Czech billionaire. Similarly, Canadian postal code database is also not free.
2. CPT code descriptions are owned by AMA (apparently they're super litigious?). Sure they took the time to write them, they should be compensated - but imagine how many interesting projects can be built if this data was freely available
On one hand, multi Billion dollar companies like Bloomberg exist, thanks to free and open data. But also things that should be free (dictionaries, postal codes etc) aren't.
The question we don't have an easy answer for is how to incentivise the people behind these things without locking their work behind paywalls? Compliance marks, homologation regimes, copyright, and other strategies all have their own downsides.
First, laws cannot be copyrighted. They're in the public domain.
Second, the case you link to was not about laws, but annotated law. The annotated version (OCGA) was written by LexisNexis, and all that work paid for by LexisNexis. Obviously, normally that would mean LexisNexis has the copyright on the annotations. This is unproblematic.
Another organization (Public.Resource.Org) posted the OCGA online. Georgia sued, arguing the annotations were the work of LexisNexis and therefore obviously copyrighted. But the problem was that Georgia had declared the annotations to be official.
The Supreme Court found this act of making them official made them essentially the law itself, and therefore uncopyrightable. Which meant LexisNexis had done all that expensive work for free, whoops.
So it's a weird edge case where Georgia should either not have accorded any special status to the annotations, or should have paid for annotations themselves if they wanted "official" ones, and made them public domain.
So the Legislature doesn’t have to maintain and oversee their own nest of troublesome legal pedants, and picks up a few contributions from legal publishing “entrepreneurs.”
By making the Annotated code official, it meant that anyone looking to prove what a particular law says in court would have to get it from the expensive, $412 hardback book, not the free version. I’d guess Lexis asked for that provision as part of its deal with Georgia.
ETA: A critical tell here are the words “The State of Georgia sued.” Georgia essentially tried to copyright its laws by having a private firm do the copyrighting, and they didn’t even make much effort to hide behind this fiction, since they were the plaintiff. Kudos to the courts for seeing past this low-effort obfuscation.
FLP's CourtListener RECAP hits hard, but it has no counterparts either worldwide or within the US. If it goes offline, democracy and rule of law across the entire world go offline with it. Federal statutes and regulations are a very small part of black letter law.
Far worse problems than PACER have been solved. Just because you've been unsuccessful doesn't necessarily mean others will be.
And if by discouraging you mean encouraging people to adopt freeways and pick up litter, I definitely intended to set expectations about how much might be achieved without addressing fundamental free law movement issues.
We do need help on Wikipedia though, but that is more ancillary and general.
Most Australian courts require or prefer that case law be cited using exact page numbers from the 'authorised reports', i.e. the ones published by Westlaw or LexisNexis.
It's funny how these numbers sound very reasonable on their face, especially if used for human review.
But if you consider programmatic searches, 10 cents per page is a lot. Consider the CPU cost of cycling through each pdf, assume 1000 letters, that's 1Khz which is like a billionth of a cent, in terms of electricity and hardware ammortization.
I'd bet that this incentivizes a 'hoarding' and reuse of information, rather than a "query when necessary" practice, which would in fact give place to monopolies like OP argues.
A newcomer legal analysis company would have to pay, say 200$ for research from their first customer. If they save those documents, then it is unlikely that their second customer will benefit from those documents.
However huge firms would make a business out of the byproduct of searches, they spend 200$ on documents, and they serve a client, but they add those documents to their own internal database, which of course has costs much lower than the nominal fees stipulated by the federal steward (PACER).
An argument could be that you can't eliminate the fees because there's costs that need to be paid. But isn't that what taxes are typically for? Especially corporate income tax. The costs are probably a nominal fee to avoid overbearing systems, similar to franchise taxes and incorporation clerical fees.
I don't think the idea of charging for documents is bad, who said that the system would need to be adopted for huge data hungry systems, I'm all for giving human analysis an advantage instead of adapting systems to play into the data munching AI fad. I'd rather see balancing that rewards human analysis rather than bringing data munching to the masses.
For example, Souter was editing his published opinion in Lee v. Weisman nine years after the case was decided.
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-justice-souter-anecdot...
I would guess corrections so long after publishing are relatively rare - but if they're also marked as such, it seems a slight stretch to say it's still being "edited" 9 years later
And not paying those fees is a second degree felony.
It would also be great for pointing out all the loopholes that have been built in by our owners.
Could it align incentives for future reform, or would it just blow to the bottom line of these companies?
showerst•1d ago
I've been considering trying to launch an OpenStates style scraper project for US laws and admin codes, but haven't had the time to attack 100 more scrapers. Even with AI help, the volume is significant.
shicholas•1d ago
rockskon•1d ago
singleshot_•1d ago
But the person who did the codification has some rights thereto, meaning that while NV can post every act that passed the legislature, they can’t publish someone else’s codification of the statutes.
This matters very little because everyone just has Westlaw and no one uses the state legislature’s website to cite statutes.
mothballed•1d ago
IMO, this should also extend to opinions -- if there is precedent that guides what the law is, it needs to be publicly published free of charge so that the public is put under notice what the law is. (someone might mention something like PACER is free in small quantities, I would counter it would cost you a gazillion dollars to be fully informed of all the precedent that forms the full common law meaning of the laws.) This is especially important in mala prohibita crimes since there's no way to even guess through moral/ethical deduction.
singleshot_•18h ago
I reckon that’s why the sixth amendment exists but if you want to make a free PACER, go for it.
gmueckl•1d ago
If anybody is worried about the jobs those businesses created, then tell them to pivot into publishing commented editions of the codes (add cross-references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.).
singleshot_•1d ago
But you could do it too! The Congressional Record is a thing, and it publishes all the acts of Congress, all the way back to the beginning.
The problem is that after you were done, the first thing someone would ask you is to cross-cite everything into the West Annotated code because no one else has your code and no one cares about it, because we all have Westlaw.
(Which publishes commented editions of the codes, with cross references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.)
It's all a little bit antiquated but it works fine. Someday it will change. I too thought it should work the way people are describing upthread when I was a computer guy but it is what it is.
rockskon•1d ago
singleshot_•1d ago
I have no idea whatsoever what is going on in Nevada.
google234123•1d ago
toomuchtodo•1d ago
https://public.resource.org/
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-can-kee...
https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/19/2022-internet-archive-he...
showerst•1d ago
I was thinking something more along the lines of a git repo per state.
toomuchtodo•1d ago
If it was as easy as writing a scraper and dumping it all in a bucket or repo, it'd already be done. It's just the usual thankless hard work over time grind.
[1] https://xkcd.com/2347/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
showerst•1d ago
Even with openstates, we have an API but don't "just" dump the bills to git for legacy nerd reasons.
The nice thing about laws is that the host websites (or PDFs) don't change templates _that_ often, so generally you can rescrape quarterly (or in some states, annually) without a ton of maintenance. With administrative codes you need to scrape more often, but the websites are still pretty stable.
The downside is that codes in particular are often big, so a single scrape might need to make 20,000 or more requests, so you have to be very careful about rate limiting and proxies, which goes to my original point that it sucks that accessing this stuff is such a mess.
toomuchtodo•1d ago