Navigating Federal Court Records with PACER

Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/07/2026
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm

In this specialized training, learn how to search and use federal court records for accountability reporting and more. National expert Seamus Hughes will give a workshop for faculty, students, academic researchers, lawyers and journalists about PACER, which provides fast access to the byzantine world of federal court records in order to better stay updated on cases, gather data on trends in the criminal justice system and report on matters of public interest. Through experience built over decades of navigating PACER, Hughes offers ground-breaking ways to exploit the gaps in the system to identify new cases and filings.

Seamus Hughes

Hughes has a career that spans journalism, academia and government.  Hughes is a senior research faculty member at University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). In addition to his academic pursuits, he is the editor of Court Watch, a news site that covers the federal court system that in the last four years has broken hundreds of national and local stories.

Hughes also works as a research journalist at the New York Times and Bloomberg Law News. In 2022, Hughes was part of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for stories on law enforcement in America. In 2026, he was a finalist for the Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

This session also has a virtual option for attendance. Please join the Zoom here.