Last Friday our colleagues at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton launched a new project, RECAP ("turning PACER around"):
RECAP is an extension to the popular Firefox web browser that gives PACER users a hassle-free way to contribute to a free, open repository of federal court records. When a RECAP user purchases a document from PACER, the RECAP extension helps her automatically send a copy of that document to the RECAP archive. And RECAP saves its users money by notifying them when documents they’re searching for are already available for free from the public archive.
Those who use PACER ("in all caps") frequently have responded to RECAP's launch with enthusiasm. Details, download, and blog at:
http://www.recapthelaw.org/.
Berkman Fellow Steve Schultze contributed mightily to the RECAP project, and we congratulate him and his CITP collaborators on their successful beta launch. For more background on the problems that RECAP addresses, check out video from a talk that Steve and Shubham Mukherjee (then a 3L and Cyberlaw Clinic student) gave at CITP last spring, "Selling the Law: The Business of Public Access to Court Records."
More: Today, Ed Felten, CITP's Executive Director, announced that Steve will be the Princeton Center's new Associate Director! Naturally we think Steve will make a terrific addition to the Princeton team — congrats, Steve! — and, while we're sad to lose him, we're looking forward to stronger ties to CITP and opportunities to collaborate and partner in the future.
Even more: For those in the DC-area, Steve will be presenting RECAP at the Gov 2.0 Expo on September 8: Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency.