pacer_lib Documentation¶
pacer_lib was made possible and is maintained by the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School.
Overview¶
pacer_lib is a library that has been designed to facilitate empirical legal research that uses data from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database by providing easy-to-use objects for scraping, parsing and searching PACER docket sheets and documents.
We developed pacer_lib in order to solve problems that arose naturally during the course of our research and our goal is to make it easy to:
download a large number of specific documents from PACER
To locate and download multiple files on PACER requires a lot of manual labour, so one of the first things that we developed was a way to programatically interface with the PACER Case Locator so that we could script all of our docket and document requests.
store downloaded dockets in a sensible and scalable way
PACER charges a fee for every page and document you access. If you have a project of any reasonable size and limited means, it becomes extremely important to keep track of what files you have already downloaded (lest you inadvertently download the file twice). We create a well-documented folder structure and a equally well-documented unique identifier that can be quickly disaggregated into a PACER search query or PACER case number.
extract information and create datasets from these dockets
We needed to create datasets for regression and textual analysis, so we baked in the process of converting relatively unstructured data (.html docket sheets) into more structured data (.csv for docket sheets and .json objects for other meta information).