Millions of US court records bound for shredder

Associated Press
August 25, 2011 2:45 pm

U.S. officials are destroying millions of paper federal court documents to save storage costs, but the effort is raising the ire of historians and others who rely the records.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says more than 10 million bankruptcy case files and several million district court files from 1970 through 1995 will be destroyed.

Cornell Law School professor Theodore Eisenberg says it's often those mundane records with no clear historical significance that are critical to establishing legal trends and court policy. Chicago-based private detective Don Haworth says records from those years can be a "gold mine."

Archives official Marvin Kabakoff tells The Associated Press he sympathizes but says keeping the records is unrealistic. He says digitizing the bankruptcy cases alone would cost tens of millions of dollars.

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