In a blog post, Free Law Project Executive Director Michael Lissner said that his organization is undertaking this project because the documents have monumental value but are not easily available to the public.
These documents are a critical part of America’s legal system, and yet there is no easy and free way to access or analyze them except through expensive third party vendors whose tools are out of reach for many people. This inhibits researchers, journalists, and the public, and is in conflict with the spirit of PACER itself.
The Free Law Project is home to the RECAP Project, an online archive of PACER documents collected from users who install the RECAP extension in their browser. When users purchase documents from PACER, the extension adds a copy to RECAP’s public repository, where it becomes available to anyone else at no charge.
