Court Records Should Be Free

The strongest throughline was that court records are not just historical documents. They are infrastructure for accountability. Easy access lets people scrutinize judges, police, prosecutors, and repeat litigants. It also lets small researchers, journalists, and ordinary citizens do work that large firms can already afford. A few practical details softened the absolutism but did not change the conclusion. PACER already waives fees under $15 per quarter, and precedent-setting appellate opinions are often available free outside PACER already. That still leaves a wide middle where ordinary case research can cost enough to discourage use. The only serious pushback was not about whether records are public. It was about what happens when "public" becomes trivially scrapeable at internet scale. That camp argued court filings often contain sensitive accusations and personal data, and that charging for access creates friction that slows data brokers, discrimination tools, mugshot extortion sites, and AI corpus builders. Most replies rejected fees as the wrong control. Big actors can pay or ignore rules, while the fee mostly blocks everyone else. The sharper takeaway was that if privacy is the concern, courts need better sealing, redaction, and publication rules, not a paywall pretending to be a privacy system.