Why Is My Court Case on MassCases?
Purpose and Scope of This Page
This policy describes why we are putting court cases on masscases.com and what you can do if you object to seeing your case show up on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
Court Cases Are Public Records
If a case is heard by the Supreme Court of the United States, no one would argue that the opinion should not be published and viewable by all. The decisions of the Supreme Court are the law of the land, and all citizens must be able to read their decisions.
In the United States, the decisions of the courts, from the Supreme Court on down to lowest municipal court, have always been available on high-priced commercial services such as Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis. These services—a "rich man's Google"—have always been available to those with the financial resources to pay hundreds of dollars per hour. The decisions of our courts have never been secret, they have just been locked up behind a cash register.
We Are All Hurt When the Law is Not Public
America is a nation of laws, and all citizens are presumed to know the law of the land. The high-priced services have not been available to citizens that wish to read court decisions, but those decisions have also been out of the reach of many working lawyers: many government lawyers, public interest lawyers, and small-town law practices cannot afford and do not have access to the databases they need to do their job.
There is a compelling public interest in making the law broadly available to all. The decisions of the courts are the rules of our society.
Why Did My Name Suddenly Come Up In Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft After All These Years?
Most courts today are publishing their opinions on the Internet. If you search for a current court case from many courts, you will find that case on the Internet directly from the court. Many other services in universities and for lawyers also have those cases.
But, Massachusetts decisions have not been as readily available. The Supreme Judicial Court and Mass. Appeals Court have decisions since 2001 available on their own site. Because legal research requires using older, as well as newer, cases, we are constantly adding older cases to our site, and now have cases available back to 1939.
Our computer is searched, just like every other web server on the Internet, by search services such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, and that information becomes available when people conduct searches.
Will You Remove a Court Case?
Public records are just that: information that needs to be available to the public. We will not remove any public documents without a court order. Remember, there are many, many copies of these court decisions in existence, and masscases.com has just one of those many copies. If you want information deleted, your only recourse is with the courts that issued the opinion. You should contact the court directly or hire an attorney to do so for you.
Can You At Least Remove It From Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft?
Yes, but only partly. If you send us a request, we will tell search engines not to index the file on our servers, using a mechanism known as the robots.txt file. That means that, after a while, the copy of your case on our server would not show up on Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.
But, remember, many places have copies of these decisions from many different sources. So, even though the case will not show up on the search engine FROM OUR SERVER at masscases.com, it is likely to show up from many other places, and we have no control over those other organizations.
To have a case listed in our robots.txt file so it is not indexed by search engines, please send your request to: masscases@gmail.com
Please include the name and decision date of the case and its URL.
Will This Be Permanent?
We might change this policy in the future and make no guarantees that we will keep this robots.txt file in place indefinitely. As explained above, court opinions are public records and without a court order, we will not remove cases.