Meet  RECAP (http://recapthelaw.org) – Be impressed.  Very impressed.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) documents sit behind a pay-wall; however, these are public record documents, so once a document has been retrieved from PACER, it may be freely shared.

RECAP  enables us to easily share federal court documents. The goal of this project is to publish an extensive archive of these documents to the public for free (our favorite word).

RECAP is an extension to the Firefox browser. There is a a video on the site that demonstrates the extension in action.

RECAP works with Firefox to upload case dockets and documents that you have paid for to the public archive, and notifying you when free versions of documents are already available.

RECAP is a project of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  It is one of several projects that harness the power of the web to increase government transparency.