Access to justice and information about justice shouldn't be gatekept through money. I understand where you're going with it, but it's very close to the same reasoning used to justify ex[tp]ensive bail -- it only fucks the poor.

"Access to justice and information about justice shouldn't be gatekept through money."

I agree. My comment was about how this site allows that access for free. And also that FOIA is moot for this information - it's publicly available without a request.

My point is that we should have gone through a FOIA route from the beginning.

And no, a lot of important information still isn't publicly available, so we still have these issues that need to be ironed out for the exact same reason as I'm describing. This release still only scratches the surface. I'm able to get court documents from city law departments, but the process takes forever (ten complaints per week, for example) and the alternative is to go downtown to work with computer systems that have poor search capabilities.

Had we been (and been able to be) aggressive from a FOIA perspective from the beginning, the inefficiencies of these systems (eg, segmentting private information is stored in court records) would be more ironed out.