The federal judiciary should open up access to opinions of the approximately 200 U.S. district and bankruptcy courts, says HyperLaw's Alan D. Sugarman in letters to the federal judiciary and to Senator Joseph Lieberman.

HyperLaw, which has been lobbying the federal judiciary since 1991 on this issue, asked James Duff, Director of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts to create a subset of the judicial opinion documents presently included in the case documents in the federal judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Filing System. (CM/ECF). Duff acts as Secretary to the Judicial Conference, the "executive committee" of judges which runs the federal judiciary, and chaired by the Chief Justice.

Sugarman also wrote a letter to Senator Joseph Lieberman, one of the primary sponsors of the E-Government Act of 2002 which required the judiciary to open up access to opinions. Sugarman asked for further hearings on the pending E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 to consider issues related to access to court opinions.

Excerpts:

We believe that the Administrative Office should (1) take the simple steps of extracting from the master database, the subset of documents and data representing judicial opinions; (2) assign a persistent public file name to each document, and (3) then place the files with associated metadata in an open server available to the public for bulk downloading and searching by search engines.

[W]e ask that judges and clerks exercise extra care in being sure that written opinions are properly designated on the CM/ECF system. To make this task easier to busy judges and clerks, we propose a new category on the system, "written orders," to permit less substantive orders to be marked as such.

Sugarman also proposed that a natural citation for the federal court opinion files: that file name and metadata include the docket entry number along with court and docket number. Sugarman said "A citation is like identifying a person. Give me date, time of birth, place of birth and the father's last name, and you have a natural 'citation' to the identity of the person, issued at the time the person is born. We need the same for court opinions."

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