Related: Bashman Archive
Overall, I find that federal appellate courts do a fine job of providing online access to their precedential and non-precedential rulings, but there’s one respect in which many of these courts are lacking: Only a few allow unpaid online access to orders granting rehearing en banc — essentially the most important cases on federal appellate courts’ dockets, since they involve panel decisions that address questions of exceptional importance or that conflict with a ruling by either another panel, the U.S. Supreme Court or another federal appellate court. As a result, those of us who monitor federal appellate courts’ Web sites in the hope of spotting interesting developments often find ourselves thwarted in our quest for the complete details on a case.
