Talk:PACER (law)

Missing Stylesheet

Is this some Easter egg? A commentary on the unusability of PACER is not very encyclopedic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.180.188.12 (talk) 00:50, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Price change

According to pacer.gov the quarterly limit went up to $15 (instead of $10). I have no idea when this change occurred but someone who is interested in this can look this up maybe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.209.197.34 (talk) 22:23, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Free the law

New project at Harvard: http://etseq.law.harvard.edu/2015/10/free-the-law-overview/ Better keep an eye on it and mention it when relevant. Syced (talk) 05:25, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Disambiguated article title

Is "law" the best way to disambiguate this? This is less a law topic as it is a computer system or webapp. int21h (talk · contribs · email) 17:35, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Litigation

I found that there are not one, but two, class-action lawsuits pending over the PACER charges. Fisher v. U.S. was filed a few months earlier than the National Veterans Legal Services Program case already discussed in the article. With two lawsuits, it seemed to make for a better flow to move the litigation into its own section, so I've done that.

Careful researchers may discover that the plaintiff in Fisher v. U.S. had filed another class action, Fisher v. Duff, no. 15-05944 (W.D. Wash. Dec. 29, 2015) (docket), in his home state of Washington. I don't think this is worth covering, because, 1) it got dismissed pretty promptly, as overlapping his Court of Claims suit, which is already covered; 2) it hasn't gotten much coverage in reliable sources; and 3) having been dismissed, it's not like it's going to get any more important. I don't think it needs to be in the article, so I've left it out. TJRC (talk) 23:42, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Revising the list of PACER alternatives

Mikikian left me the following message on my talk page. It's of general interest to the editors of the article, so I'm bringing it here for a more general discussion.

The context is this sequence of edits: addition of CourtDrive; my revert; Mikikian undo of my revert; and my reinstatement of the original, asking for a discussion here. TJRC (talk) 22:42, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Mikikian's comment:

Hi, you recently edited my revision to the list of PACER alternatives and said "List is long enough; and ought to be trimmed; blog is not a RS in any event." I couldn't agree more. I believe the list should be updated to reflect the current state of the world. From the current list, DocketFish no longer exists and neither does Caseflex. It's name has changed and the reference link is its own website. I propose deleting those two names and adding CourtDrive and Docketbird, which is specifically referenced by the federal courts in their emails to attorneys in their respective jurisdictions as quoted in the LawSites article ( https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2018/11/federal-courts-urge-caution-docket-services-vendors-respond.html ). Thanks in advance for your understanding.

Mikikian (talk) 21:49, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

My take is that there's no real point in identifying specific services; certainly not with external links to them. WP:PROMOTION says "External links to commercial organizations are acceptable if they identify notable organizations which are the topic of the article" -- which condition is not met here.

This paragraph has mostly been used by WP:SPA editors to advertise their favored sites, and I don't see that Wikipedia should assist in that. I suggest we just identify that there are commercial services, with a cite to a reference that supports that there are such sites (whether the reference names them or not). Starting to list them just generates me-too clamor to be listed.

Alternatively, we could list only those services that have shown sufficient notability to merit an article; for example, Justia and LexisNexis.

I don't have an opinion on whether LawSites, as suggested by Mikikian, qualifies as a WP:RS for citation purposes and therefore whether that supports Mikikian's suggestion of naming CourtDrive and Docketbird. I'm open to others' thoughts on that; but even if LawSites is an RS, which would allow naming those sites, I'm not convinced that naming them is a good idea anyway, for the reasons above.

Thoughts? TJRC (talk) 22:42, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

I am going to delete the two sites identified as defunct by Mikikian: DocketFish (confirmed defunct) and Caseflex (not exactly defunct, but now is PacerDash); as well as United States Courts Archive ("we have decided to retire the United State Courts Archive web site and direct you to other options"). I'm also removing Plainsite, which, although it still appears to be operational, is supported only by a reference to Plainsite itself and not to any unaffiliated reliable source. TJRC (talk) 00:21, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Also, looking at the LawSites blog article that Mikikian points to: I don't read that as calling out the enumerated alternatives as significantly important to merit mention. Mikikian says they are "specifically referenced by the federal courts in their emails to attorneys"... but they (and PacerPro and RECAP) are specifically negatively mentioned in those emails. The emails are a warning to attorneys to be careful when using them to avoid sharing sealed documents without court authorization or sharing logon credentials. It is not in any way an endorsement of those sites. TJRC (talk) 00:26, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

@TJRC: I'm the maintainer of RECAP, so I've got some biases, but I can opine on some of the things here. First, LawSites is a significant and important publication in the legal tech world. I don't know what it takes to qualify as relevant on Wikipedia, but it's a big deal generally speaking.

As for the larger questions about whether alternatives should be listed, I think my inclination is that it's a reasonable time to remove most of these. I think it made sense to name the alternatives when there was only one or two, but I don't think it makes sense now that there are six or seven or whatever. That doesn't seem like Wikipedia's job. I do think it's worth mentioning that alternatives exist. Maybe it's worth putting these in a "See Also" section if they have pages of their own?mjlissner (talk) 06:17, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Mjlissner. I'll take your word for it on LawSites (as I said above, I don't have an opinion on that; I'm not personally familiar with it, but that means nothing); but I think that's moot. Having seen the referenced article, it's not pointing out the commercial sites as special or notable; it's just relaying the federal courts' stated concerns about using them. So ultimately, whether LawSites is or is not a WP:RS is not particularly relevant, unless they have some other article discussing PACER alternatives.

I like your idea of dropping the named alternatives, and including those that have articles in "See also". Apart from the clear problems I've edited out above, I'm in no hurry to update this. Let's give it a week or so for others to chime in, including Mikikian. TJRC (talk) 02:10, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

“Proposed reform legislation” section

I recently moved an off-topic short paragraph into its own section for proposed reforms and added a couple of sentences about a more recent proposal. Because I am not an expert on this topic, I tried to work conservatively. Other than the way I structured the section, there were a few ways I thought the article could have been written a bit better

1. Remove the section entirely.
   • This seems a bit too extreme to me. It is useful to know about notable proposed legislation relating to a topic.
2. Remove the references to the previous bills, but keep a reference to the fact that there were previous bills.
   • This is probably how I would've written it if there hadn't been previous work on the topic.
3. Make a table with all the proposed legislation and then include a brief discussion.
   • This is less verbose for the bills currently mentioned but may lead to accumulation of excess details that aren't the main focus of the article. Alternatively, it could be interesting to someone interested on the history of reform attempts.
4. Spin off an article about reform attempts and have separate articles for each notable bill.
   • I don't really have time to do this, but would be what I'd like to see in an ideal encyclopedia.

Some additional thoughts I had were:

1. I wasn't sure exactly where to position the section properly in the article.
2. Is there a more neutral word than “reform?”.

Bhbuehler (talk) 21:55, 9 October 2022 (UTC)