PACER (law)

Pacer

Created by	Administrative Office of the United States Courts
URL	www.pacer.uscourts.gov
Commercial	No

PACER (acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is an electronic public access service for United States federal court documents. It allows authorized users to obtain case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts in accordance with the policies of the Judicial Conference, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States. As of 2013^[update], it holds more than 500 million documents.^[1]

Each court maintains its own system, with a small subset of information from each case transferred to the U.S. Party/Case Index server, located in San Antonio, Texas at the PACER Service Center, each night. Records are submitted to the individual courts using the Federal Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, usually as Portable Document Format (PDF) formatted files using the courts' electronic court filing (e-filing) system. Each court maintains its own databases with case information. Because PACER database systems are maintained within each court, each jurisdiction has a different URL.

PACER has been criticized for being technically out of date and hard to use, and for demanding fees for records that are in the public domain. A number of legal challenges have been mounted against the dollar amount of PACER fees and the utilization of those fees by the federal judiciary, and legislation to reform PACER fees has been proposed. In reaction to these fees, nonprofit projects have begun to make such documents available online for free. One such project, RECAP, was contributed to by activist Aaron Swartz; his downloading activities were investigated by the federal government. Although no crime was committed and no charges filed, the government closed its program of providing free public access to PACER.