When law students have difficulty navigating the federal court records platform PACER, it’s time to incorporate universal design. That’s the suggested solution in this week’s Proof Over Precedent episode. It’s also a warning for the Case Modernization Effort currently underway: Pro se litigants represent a sizeable population using PACER, but their user experience has been overlooked in favor of representing the majority user experience by lawyers and court administrators. The result, thus far, has been problematic with a court records system that has become unwieldy in scale and unusable by those most in need of understanding it.
Read the corresponding blog post.
Speakers:
- Sydney Nelson, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School
- Jacquelynn Lin, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School
Resources mentioned:
- PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records)
- Domino’s Pizza Tracker dominance
- Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF)
- Open Courts Act of 2020
- Open Courts Act of 2021
- Case Modernization Effort (CMM)
- Electronic Public Access (EPA) User Group
Share feedback and relevant topics you would like the A2J Lab to discuss: [email protected]
Stay connected with the Access to Justice Lab:
Proof Over Precedent cover art by Courtney Chrystal