PACER (law)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PACER (acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is an electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. It allows users to obtain case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts.
Each court maintains its own system, with a small subset of information from each case is transferred to the U.S. Party/Case Index, located in San Antonio, Texas at the PACER Service Center, server each night. Records are submitted to the individual courts using the Federal Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, and usually accepts the filing of documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF) through the courts' electronic filing system.
Most courts are available on the Internet, but some still require modem dialup to access. Each court maintains its own databases with case information. Because PACER database systems are maintained within each court, each jurisdiction will have a different URL or modem number.
Access for most courts is available by registering with the PACER Service Center, the judiciary's centralized registration, billing, and technical support center.
PACER documents are public record, though access to them requires registration and the documents are not indexed by commercial search engines. Registration is required for billing purposes but has the additional effect of limiting public access to these records.
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[edit] Available information
The PACER System offers electronic access to case dockets to retrieve information such as:
- A listing of all parties and participants including judges, attorneys, and trustees
- A compilation of case related information such as cause of action, case number, nature of suit, and dollar demand
- A chronology of dates of case events entered in the case record
- A claims registry
- A listing of new cases each day
- Appellate court opinions
- Judgments or case status
- Types of documents filed for certain cases
- Many courts offer imaged copies of documents
[edit] Cost
The United States Congress has given the Judicial Conference of the United States authority to impose user fees for electronic access to case information. All registered agencies or individuals will be charged a user fee.
The 2006 fee to access to web based PACER systems is $0.08 per page. Prior to January 1, 2005, the fee was $0.07 per page. The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum cap of $2.40 for electronic access to any single document.
A measure providing that no fee is owed until a user accrues more than $10 worth of charges in a calendar year was approved by the Judicial Conference of the United States in March 2001. Consequently, if an account does not accrue $10 worth of usage between January 1 and December 31 each year, all balances will be cleared.
In compliance with the E-Government Act of 2002, written opinions that "set forth a reasoned explanation for a court's decision"[1] are free of charge.
