Jacob Kopnick

A bill that would make case searches free on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) service is estimated to add $77 million to the federal deficit by 2032, reported the Congressional Budget Office Monday. The bill, titled the Open Courts Act, would require the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) and the General Services Administration to develop a centralized case management system for all federal court records that the public could access at no cost. To help pay for it, the judiciary would temporarily increase some fees for access to court documents for high-volume Pacer users, though the fees would be completely eliminated in 2026. Also in this year, the judiciary would be authorized to impose a new fee structure for filing civil and bankruptcy cases in federal courts to account for the lack of Pacer case viewing revenue. The bill also imposes mandates on entities that file federal cases or use the case management system. Developing the new system would require $230 million over 10 years, CBO said. The money would be spent on private vendors to help develop the software, plus more judiciary information technology staff to manage the deployment and maintenance of the system, and other costs including cloud storage and software licenses. As a result of the elimination of Pacer fees in 2026, CBO estimated, the AOUSC would require more money to continue providing public access to the court documents. In the years 2017-2021, AOUSC spent around $80 million annually to provide these services. Though those expenses are expected to decline by a third over the next decade via the efficiencies of the new system, AOUSC still would need about $82 million in 2026 and $496 million over the decade ending 2032 to continue to provide the services.

The Court of International Trade will stop liquidation of unliquidated entries subject to litigation over Lists 3 and 4A Section 301 China tariffs, a CIT panel said in a Tuesday 6 opinion (Court No. 21-00052) granting a preliminary injunction. Judges Claire Kelly and Jennifer Choe-Groves held that questions over limitations on CIT's ability to reliquidate the entries or grant a monetary judgment mean the Section 301 plaintiffs risk irreparable harm in the absence of one. Chief Judge Mark Barnett dissented, arguing that the court does have the power to reliquidate, and that the resulting lack of irreparable harm weighed against granting the injunction.

The U.S. Court of International Trade, site of the massive Section 301 litigation, plans to return about half its staff to its Foley Square location in lower Manhattan by mid-July, Chief Judge Mark Barnett told our affiliated publication Trade Law Daily. The court hasn't had a scheduled staff presence in its building since March 2020, said the judge. The goal is a "sustained reopening" with half the employees continuing to telework for a few months after the summer, he said. Barnett, who took over as chief judge April 5 (see 2104060041), said the early days of his tenure were dominated by how to transition out of a "maximum telework" environment. "If you spoke to any chief judge across the country, that’s what’s occupying a fair degree of our administrative time," he said. "There’s just a lot of different angles to it. There’s staff, you need to think about them. You need to think about what it means in terms of proceedings and how they’re conducted. You need to think about participants in those proceedings and what their status may be, their ability to be in person or not for various reasons."