In the municipality where I live, we're statutorily required to replace lead service lines[†] within the next 5-10 years (I forget how many). The municipality replaces the trunk lines, and homeowners are required to replace the last hop at their own (significant) expense.

Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this.

But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own.

A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession.

That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses.

I don't know, things are complicated.

[†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.

I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10.

Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.

Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!

the public should not have to pay to read the law

This goes back to Hammurabi. These decisions are the law. We pay tax dollars to create all this and even if we didn’t, if we’re held to these rulings we need to be able to read them.

They're publicly available in a byzantine system maintained by the Court Management, a governmental entity (Net Hamishpat, "court net" - slightly deviating from Beit Hamishpat meaning "the court", https://www.court.gov.il/NGCS.Web.Site/HomePage.aspx), but it is not where cases and material are referenced from in the public sphere or legal docs.

Most professionals subscribe to Nevo (https://www.nevo.co.il/), which is a "repository" of cases, law (updated to the latest revisions) etc. Even official court documents say "as seen in Nevo". They sometimes release tidbits of info to the common (unregistered) man, but searches etc are paywalled. There are other similar systems from other companies.

It seems that Nevo and co are slurping the material via a sliding-window (~7 days back) doc-dump that the Court Management lets people access as long as they commit to removing cases that the Court Management tells them to remove.

There is one renegade (Tola'at Hamishpat, "court worm" https://xn----8hcborozt8bdd.xn--9dbq2a/) which is not using this doc-dump and instead scrapes the gov website. They're doing it to not be bound by the agreement for removing documents, which they say they'll only do if they get forwarded a court order that the case is now classified. This is because the Court Management, which is not populated by judges but rather admin people, sometimes instructs removal of cases too freely (without a court order), which clouds the principle of public availability according to the Tola'at operators.

There are other sites which purport to allow free access to cases, but they're usually low-level scrapers and don't allow a full-enough view.

As an "information wants to be free" person, I find this entire saga fascinating.

Article about Tola'at people (Hebrew): https://www.themarker.com/weekend/2025-12-26/ty-article-maga...

The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

https://courtwatch.us/

It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.

If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.

If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.

My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"