Court Records For The People

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

How independent legal journalists are democratizing access to court documents.

As managing editor of Lawfare, a non-profit publication focused on national security and legal analysis, I curse PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) on a daily basis. The ancient, government-run online records system for America’s 94 federal judicial districts is finicky on its best days, and has a history of crashing just when reporters need it most. 

Back in August 2022, a magistrate judge unsealed the affidavit that led to the search on Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. After weeks, the public would finally learn why the FBI had descended on the home of the former president—or so I thought. Instead of answers, I got a 404 error message, as the system collapsed under the traffic. All that I could do was smash the refresh button, as I withstood a barrage of Slacks from my document-demanding editors. It was infuriating, but unsurprising. “The Deep State still runs on Windows 95,” national security attorney Bradley Moss wrote after the crash.

 Seamus Hughes, who founded the newsletter Court Watch in 2022, shares these frustrations. He has described PACER as a “god-awful,” “byzantine,” “judicially approved scam” with an oxymoronic name, that suppresses public access with its high fees and confounding interface. Out of spite, he’s become a master of the kafkaesque database. Former Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shactman, who has collaborated with Hughes, told me that he is the “no shit, uncontested expert” when it comes to federal court filings, with an “ability to navigate this arcane system and turn it into absolute journalism gold.” By obsessively trawling PACER, Hughes was the first to uncover a sealed indictment charging Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.