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Editor: L. Cindy Dabney
Profession: Student

Category: Book Research--Case Law

So all cases are published in reporters, and reporters are organized chronologically. This is wildly unhelpful. It's easy if you have a specific case and a specific page number, but if you are looking for information about, say, dog bites this does nothing for you. And you usually are--rarely do you only need one particular case in research. You usually want to find something topically.

Unless you are doing a sort of 'year in the life' thing about a particular court, having all the cases mixed together as they came out is not good, it would require you to skim everything in order to see if it was a case that applied to your topic. (Though I think a 'year in the life' would be very interesting. My mother and I once plotted to write a book together called something like New Mexico Reports #57 in which we would just write the stories of the cases that came out that year, we were undecided as to whether to fictionalize them or not. I still think it's a good idea, and if anyone takes it I want royalties. So does my Mom.)

Fortunately there is a way to search topically. This is a whole other set of books called a digest. Each reporter should have it's own digest; in a library you'd usually find the digest directly after the reporter on the shelves. The digest is essentially a topical index to a reporter.

Here's how it works. When a case first gets into the hands of a publisher, usually West or Lexis, they will send it on their classification department. There, editors read the case and create headnotes for it. (There are different philosophies of headnotes, and different kinds depending on what company you are using. I will do an entry devoted to headnotes later.) Each headnote is a bullet point of law for that particular case. If it is a complex case dealing with many issues there will probably be lots of headnotes, and a simpler case will have fewer headnotes. From there the headnotes are organized according to the West Topic and Key Number System. I know that this looks like yet another plug for West, but in this case it really is true that this system came so long before anything else that this is just how it's done across the board.

The topic and key number system is exactly what it sounds like. It's an index--you go to the book and look up alphabetically your topic, and it will give you the key number that goes with that topic. It lists all the headnotes for all the cases pertaining to that topic and key number for the jurisdiction your digest pertains to. The really nice thing about the Topic and Key Number System is that it is the same in every jurisdiction. A good key number will get you all the cases pertaining to your topic whether you are looking for US Supreme Court cases or Maine Court of Appeals cases. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will find any cases on a specific topic in a jurisdiction, especially the smaller jurisdiction you go. The Maine Court of Appeals has probably dealt with far fewer issues than has, say, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on the federal level. New Mexico seems to have no law on anything. (Except perhaps water and Indian law, our two specialties.)

Key Numbers work both ways. You can either start by looking up your topic in the digest and then finding the cases from there, or, if you have a good case with a particular relevant headnote, the headnote will tell you it's topic and key number and you can go back to the digest for more cases.

I personally am a huge fan of Topic and Key Number and digest searching. Especially in this electronic age people are used to running searches that they write themselves, and writing a good search is an art that I will teach you later, but there is a margin for error, and a key number is like having a search already designed for you. Plus, it is necessary for searching in books, though it's also a useful tool online, as I will explore later.

Next time I will talk about a case itself, the different parts and what they tell you. Y'all come back now, y'hear?