Not security related, but on the general topic of court information systems being a mess:
Have you ever tried to search for the docket for a specific case, to try to get more details about a case you maybe saw being reported in the news, or maybe going viral on social media? News orgs will sometimes include a link to the docket, but that even seems pretty rare (I wish news orgs would ALWAYS provide the link to the docket).
Social media posts NEVER include a link to the docket.
The thing is, pretty much every court in the country (well, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know, perhaps some states have better systems) is a completely different site.
Even if you, for example, know the names of two litigants in a case, and what state it's in, you might have a very hard time finding the case. Why? You go to the website for the state courts, and you try to search for the case and that site maybe only returns cases for the state supreme court (or the equivalent in New York which is an odd duck - their highest court isn't their supreme court, but something like the New York Court of Appeals or something like that).
The thing is, for a case or lawsuit that is still in a local city or county court or district court, you have to know exactly WHICH court the case is filed in to search for it - there's no statewide search which will even tell you what court you have to go to to find the case.
So it becomes nearly impossible to find a case your are interested in, unless you happen to already know what court it's filed in.
I think to solve this problem, Professional Lawyers use expensive, privately owned/operated third party services like Westlaw and Lexus-Nexus? I think those platforms provide a universal search.
But as an interested member of the public, I can't afford access to those services just so I can research a case to satisfy my curiosity or to correct misinformation that my relatives have seen online and accepted without any further research. I could research the case if I could find the docket, to try to find out what's actually going on (because, very often, right wing social media will make a case go viral, and nobody else is reporting on it, and if you do manage to find anything about the case, you often discover that right wing social media has reported as fact the allegations of just one side in the case/suit, and that reality is a lot messier and more complex and nuanced than the memes report).
An example was a recent post I saw, maybe a month ago, claiming a lawsuit from California where, allegedly, the father was suing for custody because the mother was "trying to force their son to be a trans girl" and I really, really doubt that that's the truth of the situation (I've never heard of a parent trying to FORCE their kid to be trans - that sounds like some bull$%^& to me). But I couldn't find the case, and the only 'news' reporting I could find were a couple of Murdoch-owned tabloids (New York Post, etc) and those Murdoch 'news' orgs are notorious for distorting the truth, treating the claims of an anti-lgbtq father as gospel truth.
