The law allows court-record fees 'only to the extent necessary.' The judiciary spent them on courtroom TVs. The refund: $350, a decade later. The fee: unchanged.

The finding, in one paragraph: the American court system operates on public filings, public dockets, and public opinions — and charges the public by the page to read them, through a paywall whose legal basis is eight words Congress wrote in 2002: fees "may, only to the extent necessary" fund the access system itself.▸ The judiciary read that as revenue; a unanimous appeals court read it as a limit and found tens of millions spent on courtroom audiovisual systems, juror-notification websites, and a study for the State of Mississippi; the remedy took a decade and returns at most $350 per person; and the fee schedule that generated the violation operates today, unchanged, collecting more than $150 million a year — while the bill that would end it begins its fourth trip through Congress.

Five documents.▸ The statute is the E-Government Act of 2002, § 205(e) (P.L. 107-347), read verbatim on govinfo — it struck the old "shall hereafter" fee authority and inserted "may, only to the extent necessary." The ruling is the Federal Circuit's unanimous 2020 opinion in NVLSP v. United States (968 F.3d 1340). The prices are PACER's own published fee schedule, read directly. The remedy is the $125 million class settlement — approved 2024, affirmed on appeal March 20, 2026. The pending fix is the Open Courts Act of 2026, reintroduced June 3 by Senators Kennedy and Wyden, as documented by EFF and the coalition supporting it.

The Federal Circuit's line-drawing was specific.▸ Fees may fund the systems that actually deliver public access — CM/ECF and electronic noticing. They may not fund what the Administrative Office had also been paying for out of the PACER account: courtroom technology, E-Juror services, victim-notification (VCCA) systems, and the Mississippi study — flat-screens and infrastructure for the courthouse, billed to the people reading the docket. The statutory text the court enforced is the one Congress sharpened in 2002 precisely to prevent this: the old authority said the judiciary "shall hereafter" charge fees; the E-Government Act rewrote it to "may, only to the extent necessary."

The settlement's mechanics measure the remedy against the harm: $125 million, distributed automatically, capped at $350 per class member, for fees paid between April 2010 and May 2018.▸ Anyone overcharged after May 2018 is outside the class; anyone overcharged today is paying the same schedule that produced the case. The judiciary admitted no wrongdoing in settling — the merits ruling, which it did not successfully appeal, stands as the statement of what happened.

The system's own documents carry the argument.▸ The fee schedule's architecture concedes the equity problem it manages: opinions are free, the first $30 a quarter is waived, courthouse terminals are free — a paywall with pinholes for exactly the users who would otherwise make its unfairness vivid. The judiciary's long-standing defense — that fees fund public access and most users pay nothing — ran directly into the litigation record: what the fees funded, in the tens of millions, was found by a unanimous court to be outside the statute. And the legislative history completes the loop: the Open Courts Act — free access, one modern system, costs recovered from filing fees and agency users rather than readers — passed the House by voice vote in December 2020, cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in a later Congress, and died each time, with the judiciary's own lobbying arm among the skeptics of its cost estimates. The 10-cent page persists not because anyone has defended it on the merits since 2020, but because ending it requires a bill, and the bill keeps almost passing.

Settlement payments flow now that the March affirmance is final — automatic, no claims required, for the 2010–2018 class.▸ The Open Courts Act of 2026 sits where its predecessors sat, with the same bipartisan sponsors and the same coalition; its funding design (filing fees and a standard annual charge to government agencies, which are themselves heavy PACER users) answers the judiciary's revenue objection on paper. The judiciary's FY2027 budget request will show what it projects from public fees — the number to watch for whether the paywall's operators expect it to outlive the decade-old ruling against how it was spent.

Statutory text and the fee schedule are read directly from govinfo and PACER's published pricing; litigation figures are from the case record as maintained by the settlement administrator and the 2020 opinion. The ~$200 million misspent-fees figure is the litigation record's approximation for the class period.