Access to Federal Court Files

As the NYTimes points out here, access to federal district court filings can be problematic if you are using PACER, the court's own document database. Readers of this blog, however, will recall from a previous entry that at least some court filings are now being made available through Justia.com.

The issue raised by the NYT piece is not just "access" but the public's right to access. PACER costs to use and the search engine is so clunky as to make it almost impossible to find what you want. Will there be a change in the government's attitude to public access to public documents? After all, those court filings are public records. For more on the debate see this entry in the Lede Blog.