Categories
Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

Open Law Journals

I discovered another very open law journal, the Georgetown Law Journal. I found it when following a link from the New York Time’s Mark Bittman to Combating Obesity with a Right to Nutrition, which I immediately snagged for my personal use.

I’ve added The Georgetown Law Library to my Open Document Sites sidebar links. Now excuse me while I go read what promises to be a fascinating writing.

Categories
Critters Documents

Have Trunk Will Travel Captive Bred Wildlife Permit

I made a request to Fish & Wildlife for a copy of the Have Trunk Will Travel CBW permit.

Access the supplied documents, including material from past requests, too.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. As part of this Act, an individual or organization that wants to use captive bred endangered species must apply for a CBW permit.

The Service provides a fact sheet that goes into more details on the ESA and the permit process. One aspect of it is that public notice has to be made of the permit application, and people must be allowed to comment on the permit.

Our management of wildlife in this country is more than a little fractured. For instance, Fish & Wildlife enforces the Endangered Species Act, but delegates the welfare of captive bred wildlife to the USDA via the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). To make things more complicated, a citizen can file suit related to enforcement of the ESA, but not the AWA. So a citizen can comment on and sue about a circus elephant permit, but not necessarily how the elephant is treated in the circus.

Makes for interesting lawsuits.

Categories
Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

An Open PACER

The costs associated with PACER has been an issue for some time. The late Aaron Swartz once downloaded 20% of the database (a figure later corrected to less than 1%) before the government shut down the server. Aaron did so because he believe that we should have access to the documents on PACER, and I agree with him, completely. I just wish he’d stayed around long enough to see me actually agree with him (something that wasn’t all that common in the distant past).

PACER is an access system. The costs are associated with accessing the documents, not having the documents. The documents are public domain. Trying to work our way around PACER is not a good exercise and isn’t really necessary either, because the documents don’t originate with PACER: people own these documents before they get tossed into PACER. The key is how to connect these documents to the world at large, without having to go broke.

The RECAP The Law is one effort to create an open PACER system. It uses a browser plug-in to download court documents whenever you purchase them on PACER. Unfortunately, though, there’s no simple way to provide court documents once already downloaded. Or to provide documents if you don’t want to use a cumbersome browser plug-in.

The Internet Archives is attempting to collect PACER documents, like it tries to collect other documents, but again, there’s no easy interface to upload documents.

The reality is that for all that PACER has an old fashioned interface, it is a simple, easy to use tool that functions well considering how often it is accessed. Most people who have great ideas about providing a free PACER either underestimate exactly how much they’re biting off, or they start out with good intentions, but didn’t get the support needed once people moved beyond the initial “We must do this!” stage. Typically, this occurs 1-3 months after an Event, whatever the Event is.

I find it unlikely there will ever be a single “Open PACER”, and frankly, one isn’t needed. We have a thing called a “search engine”. All we need to do is put our court documents online as PDFs, provide the proper label, and then let those who need the documents find us using sophisticated search tools. Simple, problem solved.

Well, except for the issue of getting the documents in the first place.

It has cost me well over $1600.00, and counting, to access the court documents for my book on the court battle between Feld Entertainment (owner of Ringling Brothers circus) and various animal welfare groups. This, just to access documents for two court cases, and a couple of small peripheral actions. One of the cases, the original ASPCA et al vs. Feld Entertainment, Inc., recently renamed to AWI et al vs Feld Entertainment, Inc, has over 621 separate document entries (and counting), many of which have 5, 10, or more attachments. That’s number of documents, not pages. The number of pages must be in the tens of thousands, or at least it seems so after so many months spent looking through all of them.

And not every document is even accessible by the public via PACER. If transcripts for status meetings didn’t appear now and again as attachments to other filings, I would have missed out on some of the interesting tidbits associated with the case. Then there are the background cases, most of which are either too old to have their documents in PACER, or have been sealed by the court (something that I really don’t approve of if the case is of general public interest).

Not long ago, PACER, supposedly in an effort to lessen the financial burden on those of us who are not lawyers (and can’t therefore pass on costs to our clients), changed its fee system. Judicial decisions are freely available, without charge. The cost per page has been increased to ten cents, but it’s capped at $3.00 if the document goes over thirty pages. Except for transcripts. If you want all pages of a transcript, well, be prepared to fork over the money.

If your PACER access comes to less than $15.00 a month, you’re off without a charge. Of course, I can blow past $15.00 in less than 20 minutes.

The system is an improvement, especially for the cases covered in my book, where the lawyers would toss in book length attachments on too regular a basis. It’s still painfully expensive.

The thing is, all of the documents in PACER are out there, typically stashed in some lawyer’s laptop somewhere. It’s perfectly legal for lawyers, legal assistants, law students, anyone with access to court documents to just post them online. Post them online, link them from a web page somewhere, and then let the search engines do the rest of the job. If the document is not sealed by the court, it is public domain, end of story (regardless of legal attempts to prove copyright on legal briefs).

My costs would have more closely resembled $3,000 if it weren’t for a couple of web sites that did just that. One has since taken down their documents, but Born Free USA still lists the court transcripts and documents for the initial ASPCA et al vs. Feld court case. I found them using Google, with a simple search. My costs would have been much less if some of the other groups associated with the court case just placed their court documents online. It wouldn’t have prejudiced the case. It wouldn’t ‘count against them’, in the courts. It would ensure that information is freely available the next time someone publishes an interestingly worded PR release.

That’s all we need. We don’t need a fancy new system. We don’t need a browser plug-in. All we need to do is put the court documents we have access to, online, and let the web take care of the rest.

Categories
Critters Documents

Feld vs PETA Motion to Compel

Publishing single court documents is easy: just incorporate a link into a post.

However, I wanted a better approach for those cases where I had several court documents. I decided to take a copy of the PACER docket, and then replace the links with those for a local document. People can then access the documents in context. For those documents I don’t have, I leave the links off. Most of the time the documents aren’t all that useful—a howdy doody to a new lawyer, an order allowing a schedule delay, and so on. Other times I felt the document wasn’t essential to understanding what was happening, or it was available in another case.

The first case I’ve ported to this online format is one of the cases associated with ASCPA et al vs. Feld Entertainment, Inc: Feld vs. PETA, where Feld was compelling compliance to a document subpoena. You can get a feel for the antagonism between the animal welfare groups and Feld’s lawyers from some of the filings. It only gets better with the primary case.

I followed the Motion to Compel case in order to get a more comprehensive view of the overall set of cases (yes cases). I also had a suspicion about why Feld subpoenaed PETA. It seemed to me that Feld’s lawyers were fishing for anything that, no matter how thinly, Feld could use to pull PETA into the Feld vs. ASPCA et al RICO (Racketeering) case. If so, they didn’t find it.

Access the local docket page for 08-mc-00004

The ASPCA et al vs. Feld document docket page is going to be a long time coming. It has over 620 docket entries, with over a 1000 document links. It’s going to take some time to prepare.

Categories
Documents

Bad Dentists and Open Libraries

The newest addition to the document collection is an opinion by Judge Paul Crotty related to the case Robert Allen Lee vs. Stacey Makhnevich et al. The case is a class action lawsuit against a dentist who forces patients into signing a confidentiality document before treatment, and her attempts to intimidate the dental patient, Lee, who wrote uncomplimentary comments about her practice on Yelp and other online sites.

The opinion I snagged rejects the defendants’ attempts to have the case thrown out in court. It’s a lovely piece of legal writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that legal documents are dry and uninteresting. The best legal documents don’t just quote relevant law—they tell a story. They paint pictures, break new pathways, shape history.

I also wanted to point out the source of the document: the Santa Clara Law Digital Commons. This site is a rich pool of legal articles and opinions that are freely and openly available to everyone—the way such writings should be. The site is well organized, cleanly designed, and very accessible: a prince among sites. From its About page:

This digital repository is a project conducted by the Heafey Law Library located at Santa Clara University’s School of Law. This archive contains scholarly materials published by our faculty and other archival collections. The purpose of this digital repository is to preserve the scholarship of Santa Clara Law and enable wider access to these materials. (emph. added)

You can read more about our copyright-claiming dentist in the ABA Journal.