PACER charges the public $0.10 per page to read its own court records. We buy those documents and donate them to the RECAP Archive so no one ever has to pay for them again.
These are public records. You paid for the courts that produced them. PACER charges you to read them anyway.
The federal judiciary collected $145 million in PACER fees in 2024 - from the public, for access to the public's own documents. Congress has called it a tax on transparency. Courts have called it a barrier to justice. It persists because no one has built the infrastructure to route around it.
We are building that infrastructure. Every document we donate to RECAP is free forever - not just for us, but for every attorney, researcher, journalist, and debtor who comes after.
The RECAP Archive, operated by the Free Law Project, stores donated court documents and serves them for free - permanently. Once a document is in RECAP, it never goes behind a paywall again.
The Open Bankruptcy Project systematically purchases bankruptcy dockets, filings, and claims registers from PACER and donates them to RECAP. We focus on cases that expose systemic problems - because the cases the public most needs to see are the ones that cost the most to access.
Every case below is available right now on CourtListener. Click any case number. No login. No fee. No paywall.
This page is indexed by search engines. Once a case appears here, anyone who searches that case number can find the free version - today, next year, or a decade from now. Every case we add is one less case anyone ever needs to pull from PACER.
The Open Bankruptcy Project indexes 105,760 federal bankruptcy cases from the RECAP Archive across the Western District of Missouri (4,560 cases) and the District of Kansas (101,200 cases). Every case links directly to the full docket on CourtListener — no login, no fee, no paywall.
→ Full searchable case index: openbankruptcyproject.org/cases/
The table below shows cases the Open Bankruptcy Project has indexed into RECAP. The "Documents" column reflects the count of PDFs currently free in RECAP for each docket; cases marked "Indexed" have searchable docket metadata only. Counts audited against CourtListener API on 2026-04-29.
| Case Number | Court | Chapter | Documents | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26-40233 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 23-40582 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 19-41415 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 25-40454 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 25-41790 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 26-40039 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 25-20394 | D. Kan. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 26-20160 | D. Kan. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 23-20604 | D. Kan. | Ch. 13 | -- | Donated |
| 25-20315 | W.D. Mo. | Ch. 13 | -- | Active |
Showing 547 cases across 11 federal courts: 138 with free PDFs in RECAP, 409 indexed-only (docket metadata). Click any case number to verify on CourtListener.
You don't have to donate money to free court records. If you practice bankruptcy law, you're already sitting on a library of PACER documents. Here's how to put them to work.
Install the free RECAP browser extension. Every time you view a document on PACER, it's automatically donated to the archive. One install, works forever. Over 300,000 users already contribute this way.
Install RECAP →If you have downloaded PACER documents from past cases - docket sheets, PDFs, claims registers - the Free Law Project accepts bulk uploads. Every document you've already paid for can be freed permanently.
Contact Free Law Project →Know a case the public should see? Send us the case number and court. We'll pull it from PACER and donate every document to RECAP. Attorneys, journalists, researchers - anyone can nominate a case.
Nominate a case →Every document donated - by us or by you - is free forever. The archive only grows.
$1 frees 10 pages from PACER. $10 frees an entire docket. $100 frees a courthouse worth of cases. Every dollar goes directly to purchasing public records and making them permanently free.
♥ Sponsor100% of donations fund PACER fees, hosting, and domain registration.
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