Judicial Conference Votes to Raise Fee for Federal Dockets

The Judicial Conference voted  See their News Release dated Sept. 13, 2011.   The conference voted to increase costs for PACER, the federal courts’ electronic docket system, from 8 cents a page to 10 cents a page.  The Conference increase the quarterly exemption amount  – PACER users who do not accrue charges of more than $15 in a quarterly billing cycle would not be charged a fee. (The current exemption is $10 per quarter.) (Thanks to the Barco Blog)

The library has a PACER account and can obtain documents for C|M|LAW students and faculty for academic purposes.  Some court docket information is available via Lexis and Westlaw law school accounts.  See  the library’s  Court, Dockets, Rules and Briefs page for more information and direct links to the Lexis and Westlaw docket databases.

PACER users may want to consider cost saving options such as:

  • Recap – A Firefox extension that will indicate which documents are in Recap’s free archive, when you pull up the docket on Pacer, and allow you to access the free documents. When you pull a document off Pacer, it saves it to the Recap archive. Searchable archive available.
  • Justia Federal District Court Dockets – Free, but limited information. Searchable by party name, lawsuit type and date filed. District Court cases only – PACER also includes appellate and bankruptcy cases.
  • Courtport’s FreeCourtDockets.com. – Docket is free, but you must go on PACER to get the documents filed in the case. Directly links to PACER to purchase filings. Searchable only by case number, but one can run a party name search on Justia Dockets. You must request an invitation code to access FreeCourtDockets