How to Read a Federal Court Docket Without a Lawyer or a Big PACER Bill

A docket is the most honest document in American public life. It is a diary kept by a court clerk, one numbered line at a time, with a date on every entry and no adjectives. Somebody filed a complaint. Somebody else filed a motion. A judge signed an order. Nobody on the docket has a talking point, and nobody on the docket is trying to win the evening news cycle.

That is exactly why you should learn to read one. When a headline says a federal judge "blocked" a rule, "tossed" a lawsuit or "sided with" an agency, the headline is somebody's summary of a stack of paper. The paper is public. You are allowed to read it. The system that stores it has some quirks, and a few small fees that can surprise you, but a citizen with an evening and a method can follow a case against an agency or a law from the first filing to the last. Here is the method.

Why the records are open

Federal court records are public by tradition and by law, and the tradition is old. The Supreme Court has recognized a common-law right to inspect and copy judicial records, in Nixon v. Warner Communications in 1978, though it is not absolute, and a court can limit access when there is a good reason. The Sixth Amendment, for its part, promises criminal defendants a "public trial," and the practice of open courts runs back through the English common law to the same tradition that gave us the rule of law itself, as The Rule of Law Is Older Than the Constitution, From Magna Carta to Marbury explains. A court that does justice in secret is a court that no one can check.

In the modern federal system the public record lives in an electronic service called PACER, short for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which the federal judiciary operates. Each federal court keeps its own electronic filing system, and PACER is the common door to all of them.

Step 1: find the case

You can get to a lawsuit three ways.

1. By name. News stories give the caption, for example "Smith v. Department of Something." You can search PACER's national case locator by party name.
2. By court and number. If a story or a filing gives a docket number, you can go straight to it. A typical federal number looks like 1:25-cv-01234, which tells you a code for the court office (1), the year it was filed (25), the type of case (cv for civil, cr for criminal) and the sequence number of the case that year (01234). The judge's initials sometimes follow.
3. By court's own search. Many courts offer a search of their own docket.

Which court you are in matters. Federal district courts are the trial courts, ninety-four of them in the federal system, and they are where lawsuits start. The courts of appeals hear appeals from them, and the Supreme Court, as How to Follow a Supreme Court Oral Argument, From the Line to the Transcript explains, sits above them all. If a story says a judge in a given state ruled on something, you want the district court for that area.

Register for a PACER account on the judiciary's own site. Check the registration page for the current terms, because you will be asked for contact information and, if you expect to run up charges, a payment method.

Step 2: understand what PACER costs, and how to pay almost nothing

Here is the arithmetic, shown. The fee is 10 cents per page. A cap keeps any one document from running up the bill: the charge for a single document is limited to 3 dollars, which is the price of 30 pages. So a hundred-page opinion costs 3 dollars, not 10, and a three-page order costs 30 cents.

And then the rule that matters most to a citizen: the judiciary waives the fee for any user whose total charges in a quarter are 30 dollars or less. (A quarter is a calendar quarter: January to March, April to June, and so on.) If you run up 29 dollars and 90 cents in the first quarter, you pay nothing. Do the multiplication. At the 3 dollar document cap, you can pull ten full-length documents in a quarter and owe nothing; at 10 cents a page you can read 300 pages of short filings and owe nothing.

Three more cost facts to know.

• Written opinions are available at no charge. Under a federal statute passed in 2002, the E-Government Act, federal courts make their written opinions available online. PACER's own pricing page says court opinions are always free, though you will want to confirm what a particular court posts.
• Docket sheets cost money too. The docket report is billed per page like a document, and the 3 dollar cap generally applies to it as to other case-specific documents, but check the fee schedule.
• Prices change. Check the judiciary's current fee schedule before you rely on these numbers, because the Judicial Conference sets it.

The practical rule: search free sources first, then pay for what you cannot find. The next step covers that.

Step 3: use the free archives

Volunteers and nonprofits have built public copies of a great deal of what citizens have already paid for. The best known is the RECAP project, run by the nonprofit Free Law Project, which pairs a browser extension with a public database called CourtListener. When someone with RECAP installed buys a document from PACER, the document is copied into the free archive, and the next person who looks for it finds it for nothing. The extension also tells you, while you are browsing PACER, when a free copy exists.

This works especially well for cases the public cares about, because many people have already pulled the key filings. Before you spend a dime, search for the case name there. If the complaint, the motion to dismiss and the opinion are all in the free archive, you have just read the whole story for free.

Also try:

• The agency's own press page, which often posts the filings in a case in which it is a party, such as a regulation under challenge.
• The court's own website, where many judges post significant opinions.
• Government publication sites, which carry some court materials.

Be aware that a free archive is only as complete as its contributors. If a document is not there, it may simply not have been bought yet.

Step 4: read the docket sheet

Open the docket sheet, and the first thing you will notice is that it looks like a ledger. It is. Each row has a number, a date and a short text. The numbers run in order, so entry 1 is almost always the complaint, and entry 20 is whatever happened twentieth. The date is when it was filed, not when it was decided or signed.

At the top is a header with the court, the judge, the case type, the date filed, the parties and the lawyers. Read this first. It tells you the name of the district judge, which side is the plaintiff, and who represents each party. If the government is a party, you will see the government's lawyer listed.

Then read the entries in order from the first. The vocabulary is a small closed set. Here are the ones you will see most often, and what they mean.

• Complaint. The document that starts a civil case. It states who is suing whom, the facts alleged and the legal claims, and it asks for relief. The federal rules require "a short and plain statement of the claim," though the document is often long.
• Summons issued / waiver of service. The defendant has been notified. In federal court the defendant normally has 21 days after service to answer or to move to dismiss, and the United States and its agencies have 60 days. Those are the numbers in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(a).
• Answer. The defendant's formal response, admitting or denying the allegations.
• Motion to dismiss. A request to end the case without a trial, usually under Rule 12(b), on the argument that even if every fact in the complaint were true, the law gives the plaintiff no claim, or that the court has no power to hear it. Questions of standing, which Standing Explained, the Doorway Rule That Keeps Courts Out of Politics covers, often appear here.
• Motion for summary judgment. A request that the judge decide the case on the written record, because there is no real dispute about the facts, under Rule 56.
• Motion for preliminary injunction / temporary restraining order. A request for an order that stops something while the case goes on, under Rule 65. These are the filings behind many dramatic headlines. See Universal Injunctions Barely Existed Before 1963, So Where Did They Come From for how the remedy grew.
• Brief / memorandum in support / opposition / reply. The lawyers' arguments in writing, one after another.
• Order. The judge's ruling, which may be a single line ("GRANTED") or many pages.
• Memorandum opinion. The judge's written reasons.
• Notice of appeal. The loser asks a higher court to review. The case moves to the court of appeals, which has its own docket and number.

When you see an entry that says "Minute Entry," it records what happened at a hearing in a sentence or two. These are often the only record of what the judge said from the bench.

Step 5: read the four documents that matter

Do not read everything. For any lawsuit against an agency or a law, four kinds of documents tell you ninety percent of the story.

1. The complaint. Read the first page and the claims section. Ask: what exactly is the plaintiff alleging, and what does he want the court to order? Notice what he does not allege. A complaint that alleges a regulation exceeds the statute is a different case from one that alleges the regulation violates the Constitution.
2. The motion and the opposition. Read each side's introduction, usually a page or two. Good lawyers state their case there in plain words. Place the two next to each other and decide which one answers the other.
3. The order or opinion. The conclusion is at the end. The reasoning is in the middle. A judge might grant a motion on a narrow technical ground, such as standing, which leaves the real dispute undecided. Know which.
4. The notice of appeal and the appellate docket. If the case has an appeal, the same method applies one level up. A ruling that has been stayed, reversed or vacated is not the law, however loudly it was announced.

One discipline will save you from most errors: separate what the court decided from what the court said while deciding. A district court's ruling binds the parties in that case. It does not settle the question for the country, and a headline that says it does is overreaching.

Step 6: know what sealed means

Sometimes a docket entry says "SEALED" or "Under Seal," or a filing is replaced by a one-line placeholder. This is not a conspiracy, but it is not nothing either.

• What it is. A sealed document is one the court has ordered kept from the public file. A judge can do this when there is a reason, such as protecting a minor's identity, trade secrets, grand-jury secrecy or an ongoing investigation. In criminal matters, indictments are sometimes sealed until the defendant is arrested.
• What it is not. It is not an admission that anything bad is inside, and it is not proof of anything. Do not infer a story from a locked document.
• What you can do. The public has a presumption of access, as Nixon indicates, and parties and news organizations sometimes move to unseal. The docket will show those motions and the judge's reasons. Often the best source of information is the docket entry on the order explaining the sealing.
• Redaction versus sealing. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 requires that filings redact things like Social Security numbers, birth dates and the names of minors, so you will see black boxes in otherwise public documents. That is privacy protection, not secrecy.

An objection: isn't this a lot of effort for a hobby?

A reasonable skeptic says: reporters and lawyers do this for a living, so let them. Three replies.

First, the people who summarize cases for the public are under pressure to be quick, and the first headline is rarely the last word. If you can read the order yourself, you do not have to wait for the correction.

Second, much of modern politics is conducted by lawsuit, and the documents are the actual argument. When a case is described as a clash between a government and a group, the complaint and the opinion are where each side states what it wants, in its own words. Lawfare Defined, and How to Tell a Prosecution From a Campaign Tactic shows how important that distinction can be.

Third, the Founders expected citizens to watch. They wrote the Sixth Amendment's public trial and the First Amendment's petition right for a reason: a free people has to be able to see what its courts are doing in its name. A docket is the cheapest civic education available, and the price, if you follow the quarterly waiver, is zero.

A short worked example

Suppose, hypothetically, that a rule from a federal agency is challenged by a trade group in district court.

1. You search the free archive for the case name and find the complaint, so you read it for nothing. The complaint says the agency exceeded its authority under a statute.
2. You open the docket sheet, which shows 41 entries, and you pay perhaps 30 cents for a short docket, well under the quarterly waiver.
3. Entry 18 is the group's motion for a preliminary injunction. Entry 27 is the agency's opposition. You read the introductions of each.
4. Entry 33 is an order granting the motion in part. You read the first page and the conclusion, and you see the judge limited the order to the group's members, which is worth noting.
5. Entry 36 is a notice of appeal. You note the new appeals-court number and follow it.

That is a complete education in how a challenge to a rule works. The same steps work for a case challenging a state law in federal court or a prosecution you are curious about. The site's own courts page can also point you to broader context.

The case in brief

1. Federal court records are public, and PACER is the main door to them, charging 10 cents per page with a 3 dollar cap per document.
2. Your quarterly bill is waived if it totals 30 dollars or less, so a few well-chosen documents cost nothing.
3. Free archives such as RECAP and CourtListener hold many filings others have already bought; search there first.
4. Read the docket from entry 1, then focus on four documents: the complaint, the motion and opposition, the order or opinion, and any appeal.
5. A sealed entry means the court has restricted access for a stated reason; it proves nothing, and the docket often shows why.

What you can do: pick one federal lawsuit in the news, find its docket, and read the complaint and the judge's first order before you share anyone's summary of it.