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The University of Massachusetts Amherst

ECON 394LI Law and Economics

Federal dockets

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) provides access to case documents for all levels of federal and state courts. Although these records are public, you must have a login and password, and the system charges 10 cents per page retrieved, including search results and per-page of documents (accumulated fees of less than $30 per quarter are waived). UMass does not currently have an institutional account for access, so each person must register individually.

Registration is not immediate; you have to wait for a confirmation that arrives by snail mail, and then you can start looking for documents.

Access PACER

An alternative to PACER is RECAP (Court Listener), which is free and does not require an account. Court Listener is not as comprehensive as PACER but its coverage of recent cases is very good.

Access RECAP

State dockets

There is not a centralized location (that we subscribe to) for finding dockets and filings for state cases. You can sometimes find this information at the state court website, for example at the Massachusetts Appellate Court website.