Kant v. United States

Opinion

1 2 3 4 7 8 PAULA JEAN KANT, Case No. 21-cv-05827-AGT

9 Plaintiff, ORDER DENYING MOTION FOR 10 v. PACER FEE WAIVER

11 UNITED STATES, Re: Dkt. No. 12 Defendant. 12

13 Paula Jean Kant was allowed to commence her case without paying filing fees and was des- 14 ignated as an e-filer, meaning that she has email access to all orders and other documents filed in 15 her case. She has now asked the Court to grant her free access to PACER, an electronic public- 16 access service for court documents. See Dkt. 12. For three reasons, her motion is denied. 17 First, as an e-filer, Kant can download without charge any order, motion, or other document 18 filed in her case. This means she doesn’t need access to PACER to keep abreast of all case activity. 19 Second, PACER’s costs, $0.10 per page, with a maximum of $3.00 per document, are mod- 20 est.1 These fees aren’t charged for profit, but for the development and maintenance of PACER’s 21 public-access services. See n.1, supra. Although Kant has resource constraints, see Dkt. 10, she 22 should be able to pay these modest fees if she needs to review filings in cases in which she isn’t a 23 litigant. 24 Third, as Judge Marilyn Hall Patel (Ret.) articulated in a different case, in which she denied 25 a similar motion, “[Kant] has not shown why [she] needs free access to PACER under the circum- 26 stances, and the court will not give [her] carte blanche to access through PACER the documents 27 1 filed not only in [her] case but in thousands of cases throughout the federal court system.” Givens 2 v. City and Cty. of S.F., 2009 WL 650264, at *4 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 10, 2009). 3 Kant’s motion is denied.” 5 Dated: December 7, 2021 6 7 ALEX G. TSE 8 United States Magistrate Judge 9 10 11 12

Q 16

Z 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 07 > Kant declined to consent to magistrate-judge jurisdiction. See Dkt. 8. However that decision by her doesn’t affect the undersigned’s ability to issue this order, which is not dispositive of Kant’s claims. See 28 U.S.C. 28 § 636(b)(1)(A); Mitchell v. Valenzuela, 791 F.3d 1166, 1168-69 (9th Cir. 2015) (even without consent, mag- istrate judges have authority to determine nondispositive matters).