Claris Law Legal Blogging Community

Editor: L. Cindy Dabney
Profession: Student

Category: Book Research--Case Law

So today's topic is cases and the books that love them. The first and most important books are Reports. These are the books where cases are actually published. Cases are published in reporters chronologically as they are decided.

On the state level there will always be at least one reporter, if not several, and usually called something helpful like New Mexico Reports, or Alabama Reports. Often there will be different reporters for state supreme courts and state courts of appeals. The former are usually called "[State] Reports" and the latter varies. It changes a little state to state, but you can usually tell what is what. If you are unsure, the Bluebook or the ALWD manual will tell you what state has what reporter.

On top of the state reporters there are regional reporters. Each of these has covers an area of a few states. These usually have really amusing names, because they were named by the founder of my company, one Mr. West (believe it or not), who couldn't conceive of something being much farther west than Minnesota. So the regional reporter covering Minnesota and Michigan and such is called the North Western reporter.

This seems a good moment to talk about citations. A small disclaimer here. West is so good as to not require proper spacing, punctuation, or capitalization, which means I'm terrible at writing citations, but pretty good at reading them. Here we will focus on reading them. A citation to a case will contain three separate parts; it should be a number, some letters, and another number. The first number is the volume number of the book, most reporters have hundreds of volumes, the letters are the name of the reporter itself, and the last number is the page number on which the case appears. So the citation 113 N.M. 85 is the case that appears on the 85th page of the 113th volume of the New Mexico Reports. This case happens to be Estate of Mitchum v. Triple S Trucking. Often when citing is done you see string cites, which included a selection of the various reporters in which the case appears, to make it easier to find cases depending on which books one has to hand. So Estate of Mitchum v. Triple S Trucking also appears in the Pacific Reporters (I told you the names were funny, didn't I? Love that New Mexico beachfront property...) at 823 P.2d 327, and the citation in full would look like this Estate of Mitchum v. Triple S Trucking, 113 N.M. 85, 823 P.2d 327 (N.M.App. Oct 18, 1991). The parentheses at the end contain the name of the court and the date of the decision. The name of the court only appears if is it not the highest court in the jurisdiction, so if there is no name, assume that it is the supreme court. In the case of Estate of Mitchum v. Triple S Trucking it's in the court of appeals, so that shows up in the parenthetical. The date has more or less specificity, usually it's just a year, but it can be up to the day.

Reporters, especially big ones, also go through different editions. This is usually comes out as a #d. So the Pacific Reporter is simple P., the second edition is P.2d, and the 3rd is P.3d. You get the idea.

For more on how to cite you should see the Bluebook or the ALWD manual, because I don't pretend to be very good at citing, though I may do something about cites later. Citing is a tricky business, I feel that if you can find the document then the job is done, but there are those who want every punctuation mark in place, and oh, there are some very explicit rules on where each space goes. What I'm interested in telling you right now, though, is what you can learn from a citation that someone else has already done.

To that end I will, on a last note about citations, tell you how helpful they can be for telling you what jurisdiction you are in. Obviously if you see a citation to the Tennessee reporter you are in Tennessee (Tenn. Or Tenn. App. for those who are curious), and if you were to take the time to memorize what states were in what region a regional reporter would tell you where you were as well. (I don't know anyone who has done this though, maybe some of the librarians. Goodness knows I haven't.) I thought I'd mention a nice trick on the federal level that I think some people over look.

The main federal reporters all have the word Fed. in them, with the exception of the ones for the US Supreme Court, which are either U.S. or S.Ct. The Federal Supplement is for the federal district courts, and the standard Federal Reporter is for the appellate level federal cases. So if you see F.Supp., in your citation you know that it's a federal district court case, whereas F.3d is an appellate case. The Federal Supplement is much shorter than the normal federal reporter, because as I said, not much law gets made on the district level.

So, to recap, cases are actually pretty easy to find with a citation. A citation will tell you the name of the book, the volume number, and the page number of the case. If you just have the name of the case is a little more difficult, but I will deal with that later. On to digests.