Judicial records are public documents that are supposed to be freely available to the public. But for two decades, online access has been hobbled by a paywall on the judiciary's website, called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which charges as much as 10 cents per page. Now Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) has introduced legislation that would require that the courts make PACER documents available for download free of charge.

The PACER system has been on the Web since the late 1990s. To avoid using taxpayer funds to develop the system, Congress authorized the courts to charge users for it instead. Given the plunging cost of bandwidth and storage, you might have expected these fees to decline over time. Instead, the judiciary has actually raised fees over time—from 7 cents per page in 1998 to 10 cents per page today. Even search results incur fees. The result has been a massive windfall for the judiciary—$150 million in 2016 alone.

Critics like the legal scholar Stephen Schultze point out that this is not what Congress had in mind. In 2002, Congress required that the courts collect fees "only to the extent necessary" to fund the system. It obviously doesn't cost $150 million per year to run a website with a bunch of PDFs on it. Despite that, federal courts have used PACER revenues as a slush fund to finance other court activities. For example, one judge bragged at a 2010 conference about using PACER funds to install flatscreen monitors and state-of-the-art sound systems in court rooms.

I should mention here that this is an issue that I've been interested in for a long time. Almost a decade ago, Schultze and I were colleagues at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, where we worked on software to promote public access to PACER documents by automatically sharing documents among PACER users. The idea of charging 10 cents a page for public documents seemed ridiculous to us back then, and it makes even less sense today.

And this is where the Collins legislation comes in. While current law allows PACER fees "to the extent necessary" to fund the system—language that leaves courts with just a bit of wiggle room—the Collins bill requires that "all documents on the system shall be available... free of charge."

That's important because it ensures that everyone, rich and poor alike, has equal access to documents that help them understand the legal system. And tearing down the PACER paywall would have benefits that go beyond dollars and cents.

The Collins bill requires that "external websites shall be able to link to documents on the system." That's a standard feature of most websites, but PACER links are useless to the vast majority of the public without PACER accounts. Opening up PACER would allow reporters, academic researchers, and anyone else writing about the judiciary to link to the judiciary's official copy of any lawsuit, legal opinion, or other document. That will allow readers to read source documents if they want to and draw their own conclusions.

The bill would also—finally—enable the application of modern software techniques to the analysis of legal documents. It requires that documents be made available in full-text format and that there be a site-wide search function available to the public. Making documents free would also enable journalists and academic researchers to perform large-scale statistical analysis of the legal process, which could help to uncover biases or other problems with the judicial system.

With just a few weeks left before election day, I'm not expecting this legislation to become law in the current legislative session. But releasing the bill now is a signal that Collins is interested in the issue—and will likely pursue it further after the midterm elections. And while many issues have become highly partisan, public access to judicial records ought to be a bipartisan cause, making progress possible regardless of who has control of Congress in the next legislative session.