Carver: RECAP to be managed jointly by Free Law Project and CITP

Professor Brian Carver of Free Law Project announced on 19 May 2014 that the RECAP platform — which provides free public access to selected U.S. federal court documents — will be managed jointly by Free Law Project and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy .

Here are excerpts from the announcement:

Today Free Law Project announced that it is partnering with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy to manage the operation and development of the RECAP platform. Most readers here will know that the RECAP platform utilizes free browser extensions to improve the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for U.S. federal courts, and crowdsources the creation of a free and open archive of public court records. [...]

RECAP is a perfect complement to Free Law Project’s existing efforts. The first version of CourtListener covered only the federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. We’ve been working recently to roll out coverage of the courts of last resort in all the states (not quite there yet…) but have largely held off on tackling “the PACER problem” presented by the federal district courts. In part, we knew we could wait on this because RECAP was already addressing it about as well as anyone could. We have long assumed that we would at some point look to merge the RECAP documents with our existing documents, and knew because we focused on different courts, these would be largely complementary sets of documents. Well, the time to tackle that merger has arrived, and in the process we hope to provide a long-term home for RECAP maintenance and improvement. [...]

P.S. Please follow @RECAPtheLaw. We intend to start tweeting there.

See also, Steve Schultze’s post at Freedom to Tinker.

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

HT Pablo Arrendondo

Filed under: Applications, Data sets, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Brian Carver, Center for Information Technology Policy, Free access to law, Free Law Project, Princeton CITP, Public access to court decisions, Public access to judicial decisions, Public access to legal information, RECAP, RECAP Archive, Stephen Schultze, Steve Schultze



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