PACER Update

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is a distributed system that provides online access to federal court documents. On August 10th PACER announced it would be removing access to large swaths of cases from the system:

As of August 10, 2014 the following information will no longer be available on PACER:

• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit: Cases filed prior to CM/ECF conversion
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Cases filed prior to March 1, 2012
• U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California: Cases filed prior to May 1, 2001

From now on in order to access the covered cases one will have to contact the court directly.

Why PACER removed access to case archives of five courts

The Washington Post reports that the court’s migration to a new case management system is the cause of the change.

It may be possible to access some of the removed documents through the RECAP database of PACER documents.
The RECAP project is a partnership of the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and the non-profit Free Law Project. It consists of a browser extension that informs you when there is a free copy of PACER documents you are browsing. If there is not a copy in the RECAP database it prompts you to share the document with the database after you purchase it.