How can improving the collection, sharing, and analysis of data make the civil justice system more accountable to other government institutions, participants in the justice system, and the public at large? We tackle this question from three angles. First we show how accountability can create opportunities for civil justice reform. Drawing on work in other social spheres on large datasets, we identify three lines of research that court data could inform: the extent that structural racism and other biases shape processes and outcomes; the impact of lack of representation on litigants’ experiences and outcomes; and the antecedents and consequences of court involvement for poor people. A second focus is the obstacles that prevent us from increasing our store of knowledge about civil justice problems. These obstacles include: the lack of good data, legal barriers to obtaining data, and real and perceived institutional risks to sharing data. Finally, we report on our efforts to design and build a civil justice data commons (CJDC) addressing these barriers in order to provide fast and frictionless access for policy research as well as operational insights for courts and civil justice institutions to improve equity and service delivery.

This chapter will argue that the federal court data paywall—PACER fees—unduly hinders the production of research on America’s federal courts. This effective limitation on public access to data leaves us with less access to better justice. Worse, there is little to no offsetting benefit. Although PACER fee revenue is often described as high, it is actually tiny as an economic matter. Congress can and should enact legislation that both mandates free public access to PACER’s vast array of information and replaces the associated fee revenue. That would allow the judiciary to continue its current operations and also allow appropriate research on federal courts.