With appreciation to Charlotte Alexander (Georgia State) for alerting me to this development and assisting with this post, information on a new PACER resource follows.
For researchers who study the federal courts, litigation patterns and outcomes, and judicial decisionmaking, the Free Law Project (FLP) operates the RECAP Archive, which seeks to reproduce the contents of the Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER) system in a single, comprehensive, searchable database (RECAP is PACER spelled backwards). The archive sets out to address major problems with PACER that make life difficult for researchers: a per-page download fee, a lack of fine-tuned search capabilities that can mine a document's text, and a clunky search interface.
The RECAP Archive draws its materials from two sources: 1) PACER users’ "donated" documents, and 2) courts’ PACER Written Opinions Report (WOR) that includes all documents that each court has designated as a judge's "written opinion."
This second stream of RECAP contributions is new. In cooperation with Professors Charlotte Alexander (Georgia State) and Javad Feizollahi (Georgia State) and with support from a U.S. Department of Labor grant, FLP just completed a comprehensive download of all material available via the WOR, and updates the download daily. All told, the RECAP Archive now contains about 3.4 million documents from 1.5 million federal district court and bankruptcy cases from 1960 to the present, including all judicial opinions available via the Written Opinions Report. The RECAP search form and more information about the Archive are here.
While this development is exciting for researchers, some important caveats are in order. First, any RECAP documents other than court orders appear in the Archive only because a PACER user donated copies of documents to the archive. Second, WOR documents are the product of each judge’s determinations of which of his/her opinions to include. Despite efforts to standardize judge decisions (e.g., here) variation across judges introduces some level of selection bias.
Caveats notwithstanding, the RECAP Archive warrants attention.
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