RECAP is an online archive and free extension for Firefox and Chrome that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.





If you use PACER, install RECAP. Once installed, every docket or PDF you purchase on PACER will be added to the RECAP Archive. Anything somebody else has added to the archive will be available to you for free — right in PACER itself.

Tens of thousands of people have used RECAP. To join them, simply install it using the button above, and then use PACER as you normally would. It’s that simple. If you don’t like it, you can uninstall at any time.

Have questions? We’re here to help.

The Archives and APIs

Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs.

Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily.

Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers.





What People are Saying

Recap is an invaluable resource for journalists, activists - and really anyone who cares about law and justice in the United States. The work of the Free Law Project puts our courts within reach for everyone, and reinforces a pillar of democracy that is often overlooked. Everyone should support — and contribute — to this effort. Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for New York Times

If you are a PACER user, I strongly encourage you to download RECAP. Todd Ito of the Chicago Association of Law Libraries

Citizens deserve open and easy access to all public court documents. Until public access becomes a matter of policy rather than blocked by PACER’s artificial pay wall, independent efforts like RECAP continue to fill a critical gap in our ability to foster a more participatory and engaged democracy. Ari Schwartz, Center for Democracy and Technology

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History

RECAP is a joint project of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and Free Law Project. It is one of several projects that harness the power of the web to increase government transparency.

RECAP is led by Free Law Project co-founders Brian Carver and Michael Lissner. RECAP was created by Harlan Yu, Steve Schultze, Timothy B. Lee, and Ka-Ping Yee based on the principles described in Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

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We also have an API and bulk data available for developers. For details, get in touch.