What does the RECAP name mean and what's its origin?

The RECAP name was originally coined by its founders with the slogan, "Turning PACER Around." RECAP is PACER spelled backwards.

The name and slogan make sense because RECAP users work together to pull legal cases and filings out the federal government's filing system PACER, where cases are inaccessible and undemocratic.

In 2023, we expanded the RECAP project into a collection of tools we now call the "RECAP Suite." These tools include the extension, alerts, recap.email, an API to scrape PACER, x-ray, and the RECAP Archive itself.

RECAP Suite is also a play on words. Spelled backwards, it forms the phrase: "Et uis PACER", which can be translated from Latin as: "And [our] Right to Public Access to Court Electronic Records."