Most courts (in the US and elsewhere) are paid for by
user fees, there are
fees for filing lawsuits, for court
resources used in court cases etc. At the
end of a case
(sometimes earlier) the court rules which side(s) should pay
the
fee and if one side should pay (some) of the other sides
lawyer fees too. One
of those sides may be a tax-funded
entity such as a district attorney's office,
but that
doesn't change the principle. In criminal cases there are
sometimes
rules where the government actually pays for both
sides (In the US, police is
required to mention this
whenever they arrest someone, because of a famous
court
ruling involving a convict named "Miranda").
Direct Tax funding
is limited to the basic infrastructure
of having courts at
all.
Additional services to the public (other than walking
into the
courtroom and taking notes with your own pen and
paper) are separately
billed.
You pay to get food from vending machines in the
courthouse
(may be outsourced), for getting copies of court
records (electronic or on
paper) etc. In courts that allow
televised or radio reports, they probably
charge for use of
the power outlets and other facilities provided to the TV
stations.
As another example, to download electronic files from
pacer.gov, there is a fee for each page, but the first N
pages per user are
free.
In the US, the court reporters who write official
transcripts of
what happened are sometimes independent
one-(wo)man companies hired by the court
to do this job.
They are not required to provide the finished transcripts
to the
court until some later date, but it is legal for
them to provide early access to
anyone who pays them
directly to do so, because this extra income reduces
the
price the courts have to pay. In fact, I suspect that the
sale of early
transcripts is now their main business model,
and the courts willingly give them
a long deadline to
increase this business.
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