Skip to main content

Documents Removed from PACER

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has recently updated its online notice regarding removal of documents from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database.  According to the notice, the new PACER system is incompatible with older case documents from several courts; these documents have been removed from the PACER system.  The affected courts are:
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit (cases filed prior to January 1, 2010 have been removed)
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit (cases filed prior to January 1, 2008 have been removed)
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit (cases filed prior to January 1, 2010 have been removed)
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (cases filed prior to March 1, 2012 have been removed)
  • U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California (cases filed prior to May 1, 2001 have been removed)

Legal researchers lacking access to databases other than PACER can still access the removed cases by contacting the individual courts, albeit more slowly and at increased expense.

This move has been controversial as the removed documents include a number of notable civil rights cases.
Training on using the new PACER system is available online.

Update: as of 9/19/14, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has announced plans to restore these documents to PACER.  Details are available here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires