Category Featured Gov Doc

Last month, I wrote a blog post about PACER, the system for federal court documents.  This system includes many documents related to the Cuyahoga County corruption trials, including the trial of Mr. Dimora.  There were several cases involving Mr. Dimora.

Here is a selection of PACER documents from Case 10-0387, the case that has been in the news recently:

• List of Documents, many of which are available on PACER.
• Order from Pre-trial Conference
• Transcript of Motion Hearing (May 20, 2011)
• Transcript of Motion Hearing (October 5, 2011)
• Verdict
• Proposed Jury Instructions for Forfeiture
• Objections to Proposed Jury Instructions for Forfeiture
• United States’ Response to Objections to Proposed Forfeiture Jury Instructions
• Forfeiture Order
• Opinion and Order on WKYC TV’s request to release the exhibits admitted at trial

Many of you may have seen the Schoolhouse Rock video I’m Just a Bill, which tells how a bill becomes a law. But after the President signs a new law, the new law also needs to be promulgated, which Merriam-Webster defines as made known and put into action or force.

The new “session law,” or individual legislative enactment, is initially released as a “slip law.” Most slip laws are just one or two pages of paper, though major legislation can result in very lengthy slip laws. Most federal session laws are Public Laws (acts of general applicability) and are given a public law number communicating the Congress that passed them and a sequential numbering among the acts of that Congress — for instance P.L. 111-108 was the 108th Act of the 111th Congress. The GPO has digitally-signed PDF slip laws on FDSYS. Our library keeps print slip laws on a shelf just outside the 3rd floor computer lab.

At the end of a session of Congress, all of the slip laws are published in the United States Statutes at Large, which remains the permanent official source for positive evidence of federal law. (The page numbering is identical to the page numbering printed “ahead of time” on the slip laws.) Statutes at Large volumes from 2003 to 2008 are available on FDSYS. The Law Library’s paper Statutes at Large is shelved next to the slip law collection.

All permanent, public laws are then codified. This involves updating the existing sections of the United States Code to include the new legislative enactments. Non-permanent laws are not codified. An example of a non-permanent law is the annual budget legislation. The Government Printing Office publishes the official version of the United States Code. The official version contains the laws themselves, with nothing else. Digitally signed PDF volumes of the official version are available on FDSYS. The Law Library’s print volumes of the official United States Code are shelved with the slip laws and Statutes at Large.

The commercial publishers West and Lexis each produce annotated versions of the U.S. Code, which contain extensive references to cases relating to each code section. To illustrate the large volume of text added by, for example, West’s annotations, here is a picture of the official United States Code:

and here is a picture of United States Code Annotated:

West also produces an annotated version of the Ohio Revised Code, called Baldwin’s Ohio Revised Code Annotated. Lexis produces Page’s Ohio Revised Code Annotated. Print versions of both of these are available in the Law Library’s first-floor conscience area. Though the color-schemes used in the book design of these publications pre-date their acquisitions by Lexis and West, it turned out that the red set is now published by Lexis and the blue set by West.

The unannotated Ohio Revised Code is freely available online from LAWriter.

Do you need case or docket information from a Federal appellate, district or bankruptcy court? Public Access to Court Electronic Records  (more commonly known as PACER), a service of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, provides online access to court records.

PACER’s date coverage varies by court. Its Court Information  page contains specific dates covered. According to the CM/ECF FAQ , “[i]n January 1996, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts began development of the Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF) system.” PDF versions of many documents submitted through this system are available to PACER users.  However, the coverage is spotty.

To illustrate some of the information PACER can provide, here are three cases the Counselors have studied this semester (the hyperlinks are to copies of documents):

• Burr v. Burns, 439 F.Supp.2d 779, (S.D.Ohio 2006),  is from 2006. When one views the menu, one sees options for Alias, Associated Cases, Attorney, Case File Location, Case Summary, Deadlines/Hearings, Docket Report, Filers, History/Documents, Party, Related Transactions, Status, and View a Document.  When one is viewing the Docket Sheet, one can select any document with hypertext. For example, if one selects document 5 (the motion to dismiss), one can view the motion to dismiss, the brief in support of the motion, and the plaintiff’s answer. One can also view the state court compliant and the defendants’ answer.
• Young v. New Haven Advocate, 315 F.3d 25631 (4th Cir. 2002),  is from 2002. When one selects it from the results list, a General Docket opens, and one has the option of viewing the full docket for an additional fee. One may view a docket entry, but there were no links to documents in the entries I viewed.
• Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, Inc., 682 F.2d 338, (1st Cir. 1982),  is from 1982, so there is not much information about it on PACER. If one does a party search for Hustler in the New Hampshire federal courts, one will find an entry for this case. The entry contains links for Associated Cases, Attorney, Docket Report, Filers, History/Documents, Party and Related Transactions. However, the Attorney link says no attorney is listed, the Docket Report refers one to the physical files at the National Archives, the History/Documents link indicates that the files have been transferred to NARA, the Party link simply gives the names of the parties, and the Related Transactions link is another reference to the NARA transfer.

PACER has its Training Manual available online, and the Government Printing Office has additional training material on its website.

PACER is a fee-based system. Users register for an account and provide a credit card number.  If one wishes to practice using PACER without registering, one can use the PACER training site, which contains a selection of cases from New York. According to the current fee schedule, it costs eight cents per page to view documents, but there are no charges to the user if the charges are less than $10 in a quarterly billing cycle.

One can cut down on expenses by using the RECAP Firefox plug-in.  According to the RECAP site, “RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository.”  The alert appears in the form of the letter “R” in a small gray box next to the document.  (Since the Counselors just discussed forum selection clauses this week, please note that the user agreement for RECAP includes a New Jersey forum selection clause.)

For additional information about PACER and RECAP, you may refer to Andrew Plumb-Larrick’s July 27, 2010 blog entry.  If you have further questions about PACER, or need assistance with your research, please visit the reference desk at the library.