I teach law students how to conduct legal research. The most effective way to do this is to provide hands-on training, but one of the most important tools, PACER, is off limits.
PACER, which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is profitably managed by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and it contains all manner of recent federal court filings, from complaints to opinions.
Even though PACER is operated by the U.S. government, and even though the records it contains are public records, most law school libraries simply cannot afford to give their students and faculty direct access to PACER. Why? Because using PACER can get expensive, and this makes PACER's "public access" debatable.
PACER content sits behind a pay wall. To view and download content from PACER, users must first create an account and pay eight cents per page, with a 30-page cap, for most court filings. The notable exceptions to this fee structure are opinions and transcripts. The $2.40 price cap does not apply to court transcripts that can run into the hundreds of pages and, therefore, into hundreds of dollars. And anything designated as a "written opinion" is free of charge.
With most documents costing less than three dollars and opinions free of charge, this is a bargain, yes? Maybe not. The opinions, free or not, represent only one slice of the data, and at law schools we can almost always find them elsewhere. It is the rest of the filings on PACER (e.g., complaints, briefs, motions, etc.), uniquely available there, that are of most value to law libraries.
Here at Stanford Law School, one law student ran a number of searches on PACER last year and, in a matter of hours, rang up a $500 tab. This student was performing reasonable searches for a legitimate project. If just 5% of our students ran similar searches, we would be faced with a bill that rivals those from the larger commercial online databases, LexisNexis or Westlaw, yet PACER is operated by the U.S. government.
What is happening at most law schools? Librarians, the traditional gatekeepers for research resources, simply cannot allow their patrons full and direct access to this valuable resource. Instead, the librarians keep a tight hold on these accounts and mediate the majority of the searches for fear of a large budget-busting bill. In a survey that I conducted of law librarian PACER users, only three out of the 63 academic library respondents provided unfettered access to PACER.
Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis and Westlaw have expensive products that provide users with access and searchability to the otherwise unsearchable PACER content. Most law schools do not have subscriptions to these costly docket-aggregation tools. Truly, we should not have to go to a commercial vendor to reach these public filings.
When schools cannot let their students and faculty explore PACER, they are placed at a disadvantage. We teach our students to be cost-effective researchers, yet we withhold full access to PACER. How can you really learn to use a resource if all of your searches are done by someone else? How can faculty research reach its full potential if we are afraid of sharing our user name and password? Librarians are compulsive about providing great levels of service, but here we hold back, dreading the bill from the U.S. courts.
This feeling of frustration prompted a few of us at our law library to start a petition to improve PACER, and it has received the wide support of librarians, professors, practitioners and journalists. The petition (www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-pacer) also asks the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to improve PACER by enhancing the authenticity, usability and availability of the system. We ask that all federal depository libraries have free access to PACER.
While many argue for full, free access to PACER for all, and we do not object to that, the petition asks for less. Free access at federal depository libraries, including law school libraries, is an excellent first step.
We seek to gather more support and momentum for improving PACER. Our students — our future lawyers — are unprepared to use this resource, and we have to do something about it. We need to fully prepare our attorneys to do the best research at the right price.
Erika V. Wayne is the deputy director at the Stanford Law School Library and also a writer for the Legal Research Plus blog (http://legalresearchplus.com), where an open letter to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts can be found.
