Legal Research

Upgrading Court Archiving Systems

An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Excerpt from the article:

Americans have grown accustomed to finding just about anything they want online fast, and free. But for those searching for federal court decisions, briefs and other legal papers, there is no Google.

Instead, there is Pacer, the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems. Cumbersome, arcane and not free, it is everything that Google is not.

Recently, however, a small group of dedicated open-government activists teamed up to push the court records system into the 21st century by simply grabbing enormous chunks of the database and giving the documents away, to the great annoyance of the government.

Read the whole article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Full post as published by LexLibris on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).