PACER charges $0.10/page for public federal court records, creating a paywall that costs researchers hundreds of dollars per case and subsidizes unrelated court IT projects

The federal judiciary charges the public $0.10 per page to access court records through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the only comprehensive system for viewing federal case filings. While individual pages seem cheap, a single complex case can contain thousands of pages across hundreds of docket entries, meaning that following one case can cost hundreds of dollars. Journalists investigating judicial corruption, researchers studying sentencing patterns, legal aid organizations tracking systemic issues, and pro se litigants trying to find precedent for their own cases all face this paywall. A federal judge ruled in 2018 that PACER fees were being impermissibly used to fund unrelated court technology projects — the judiciary was overcharging for access and spending the surplus on internal IT systems that have nothing to do with public records access. The direct harm is that public court records — which are supposed to be public — are effectively private for anyone without a budget. A journalist investigating a federal judge's pattern of unusually harsh sentences cannot afford to download the sentencing documents from hundreds of cases. A legal aid attorney trying to find similar cases to help a client cannot spend $300 on PACER downloads when their organization operates on a shoestring budget. A pro se litigant trying to understand how judges in their district have ruled on similar motions is locked out of the information that would help them make their case. The result is an information asymmetry where large law firms with PACER budgets have comprehensive access to the judicial record, while everyone else operates in the dark. This is not a hypothetical access problem — it is a daily reality for thousands of people trying to engage with the federal court system. PACER persists as a paywall because the judiciary has become dependent on the revenue. The fee-funded model means the courts do not have to ask Congress for appropriations to run their electronic records system, which gives the judiciary independence but at the cost of public access. Bipartisan legislation (the Open Courts Act) has been introduced multiple times to eliminate PACER fees and fund the system through appropriations, but it has never passed because it would require Congress to actually appropriate the money — approximately $150 million per year — and no legislator wants to champion spending $150 million on 'making court records free' when the current system 'works.' The EFF, Free Law Project, and other organizations have campaigned for years to end the paywall, and the class action lawsuit resulted in a favorable ruling, but the judiciary has been slow to implement meaningful changes. The structural incentive is clear: the courts benefit from the revenue, Congress does not want to replace it, and the people harmed lack the political power to force action.