Free Online Research Tools: RECAP Archive

Looking for a free source to access court records from the US Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts? You may want to try the RECAP Archive. The RECAP Project is a user-driven project to improve free access to documents on the PACER system. Remember that PACER is the electronic public access system for those court records, but has a paywall. PACER charges fees to search and download documents. Additionally, the search options on PACER are limited. There is no keyword or full-text searching. Users must have the case number, party names, or date range for District Courts, or the Social Security number or Tax ID number for searching in Bankruptcy Courts.

RECAP is a joint project of the Free Law Project and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. The RECAP browser extension is available for Firefox and Chrome, and works with the PACER system. After installing the extension, use PACER like normal, and the extension will alert you when free documents are available in the RECAP Archive. Any documents that a RECAP user downloads from PACER are automatically donated to the Archive. However, you do not need to use the RECAP browser extension in order to use the free Archive, just visit the website. On the Archive, anyone can access millions of court documents for free. The Archive also has more search options than PACER such as keyword, document type, topic, and full-text document searchability.