access federal court filings: pacer realities and courtlistener alternatives
domain: pacer.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Register for a PACER account at pacer.gov; note that PACER charges per-page fees for document access (currently $0.10/page, capped per document) and requires a funded account.
Use the PACER Case Locator (PCL) search UI or the CM/ECF NextGen API (where available) to find case numbers; the API's availability varies by court and is not uniformly documented.
For programmatic access without per-page fees, prefer the CourtListener RECAP API which mirrors a large subset of PACER content for free.
To trigger PACER document retrieval into RECAP, install the RECAP browser extension or POST to the CourtListener RECAP upload endpoint with a PDF you have already fetched, making it freely available to future users.
For bulk docket data needs, consider PACER's Judicial Conference bulk data program or academic data-sharing agreements rather than scraping individual docket pages.
Known gotchas
PACER has no official REST API for most courts; screen-scraping CM/ECF is against PACER terms of service and technically fragile — use CourtListener or licensed data providers instead.
PACER fee exemptions exist for certain non-profit, government, and academic users but require application; do not assume exemption status.
Some sealed, restricted, or in-camera documents are never available via any API or RECAP regardless of access level.
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