PACER (law)

PACER (acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is an electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. It allows users to obtain case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts in accordance with the policies of the Judicial Conference, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States. As of 2013, it holds more than 500 million documents.

Each court maintains its own system, with a small subset of information from each case transferred to the U.S. Party/Case Index server, located in San Antonio, Texas at the PACER Service Center, each night. Records are submitted to the individual courts using the Federal Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, and usually accepts the filing of documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF) through the courts' electronic court filing (e-filing) system. Each court maintains its own databases with case information. Because PACER database systems are maintained within each court, each jurisdiction will have a different URL.

PACER has been criticized for being technically out of date and hard to use, and for demanding fees for records which are in the public domain. In reaction, non-profit projects have begun to make such documents available online for free. One such project, RECAP, was related to a federal criminal investigation of Aaron Swartz which was later dropped.

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