access to court documents

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dwell

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I need to review all the various documents filed in a long running and now dormant civil case. My county has sent all the hard copies off to a service that apparently scans them, then stores and serves out the scanned images back to the originating county. The county claims there is no way for a citizen to view any of the documents "until we build a new courthouse", which while in the plans is likely years away. I think the real issue is that the county has to pay for access to its own scanned docs in the form of licensed computer chairs, and they don't want to allocate any to the general public, so are paying for only 2 that go to the computers used by court staff for their work, and letting the public use them would be disruptive. I understand the likely hassles involved, but it seems like court records should be public records, which by definition should be available to the public. I don't want to have to pay for copies of every document in the file (although they haven't proposed that to me yet as an option) as most are likely useless for my purposes, and the number of pages would be huge.

What laws/court decisions would explicitly direct the county to find a way to either let me sit down and go through page by page on on e of their computers, or better, make me a readable electronic copy for a reasonable fee?
 
Thank you Moose. I had come to the conclusion that judicial proceedings were for some reason not covered by the PRA, hence the need for rule 10.500 of the California Rules of Court which only applies to non adjudicatory activities, and/or the statement from the Judicial Council along the lines of 'public access to adjudicatory documents is well established through case law'. I want to go back with examples of case law if I possibly can.
 
You may be right... I just linked you to the first thing that came to mind.

What county are you in?

Who told you that you could not view anything until they build a new courthouse?
 
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