Claris Law Legal Blogging Community

Editor: L. Cindy Dabney
Profession: Student

Category: Book Research--Case Law

Greetings, dear reader. I will start off with a word about myself, and then jump right into it. My name is Cindy, and I am in my final semester of law school at the University of New Mexico, barring something going horribly, horribly wrong. I'm a student rep for and a huge fan of Westlaw, which is one of the things that made me so interested in legal research. I'm looking to go to library school next year, seal my future as a law librarian, I've been accepted to one of my schools and am waiting to hear beck from the other. My lifelong ambition is to be interviewed on The Colbert Report.

So that's me in a nutshell. On to my real purpose. It's difficult to strike a balance with a chore like this; I want to start simple enough that even a non-lawyer who is doing his or her own research would find this helpful. I have decided to begin at the very beginning, so I apologize for the majority of readers who already know this, but I think it's nice to lay a good foundation. Please, though, feel free to ask questions about anything, or send me corrections. With that in mind, I begin with the court system.

I want to warn you that I am biased. I will try to be as general as I possibly can, but it is objectively true that I will be using New Mexico as my example most often since I know it best and that I will be using West a lot, simply because I think that it is genuinely the best, and I would go to it first for most of what I would like to do, though I will try to talk about Lexis and about free legal resources. I will start in the books, however.

We live in a common law system, unlike most of the rest of the world. In most countries the law is contained in codes, and judges simply have to fit every case into the confines of the code. The code is the only law, and it is complete. (Though in many ways, rather than making judges more confined, it simple makes them more creative.) In the common law system, though, every time a judge hands down a ruling that ruling becomes part of the law. This makes our law extremely interesting; it is an even growing, changing thing, but it also makes it almost hopeless to wade through. There are a few rules, though, as to what is actually important law.

First of all we do have something comparable to the civil law codes, which is what the state and federal legislatures hand down. These are statutes, and at the more minute level, we have regulations to follow. Regulations come from administrative agencies. But while we do have these organized statutes and regulations they are all subject to interpretation by the court system. The courts sort of fill in the blanks. (Another way that this difference can be seen is in who our judges are. In civil law countries an aspiring judge would simple go to judge school. In our common law system judges are almost always former lawyers, people used to arguing and manipulating the law.)

The most important thing to remember is stare decisis. (Why yes, I do speak Latin.) This means that courts cannot just make up the law as they go along; they do have to follow the precedent set by other courts. Specifically, higher courts. There are typically three levels of court, the district court, the court of appeals, and the supreme court. This is true both at the state level, and at the federal level, though some states have their own quirks, like New York, where the Supreme Court is actually a lower court and the Court of Appeals is the highest court. Everyone knows about the United States Supreme Court, it is the highest court in the nation, and thus the court least bound by stare decisis. They are required to take their own prior decisions into serious account, but overall they are the most free to change the law.

Typically a case starts in district court, either state district court or federal district court. (Which depends a lot on subject matter. Only certain issues are federal ones, and federal courts are not allowed to hear anything else.) The district court cases rarely make it into law, or at least rarely get published because these courts have the most obligation to follow the established law. Almost no law is made at the district court level. (Usually, there are also a multitude of smaller courts in any jurisdiction, small claims courts, or topical courts like bankruptcy court, family law court, etc. But I want to keep things general for now.)

From the district court the party in a case has a right to an appeal to the court of appeals, either in their state or at the federal level. Most of these cases get published, and most become law. It's not as binding as law made in a higher court, but Courts of Appeals make us a lot of the law simply because they hear so many cases. This is at least partially because there is a right to one appeal, but from there on another appeal of your case is at the discretion of the court.

A supreme court does not have to hear any case that it doesn't want to. (Though of course there are cases that are almost mandatory. There was no way that the Supreme Court was going to avoid Bush v. Gore for example. I have also heard that the Supreme Court has been fond of taking nude dancing cases, just for the fun of it. We shall see if this changes with the new additions.) After a case in the court of appeals a party would petition the supreme court to hear the case, and the court would either grant certiorari ("cert") meaning they will here the case, or deny cert, which means they won't.

The federal Supreme Court is the highest, as I've said, it answers consistently to no one. State supreme courts are the highest in the state, however they may still be subject to the decisions of federal courts. If a party still didn't get a decision they liked from the state supreme court they might then go on to a federal court.

While state courts are, naturally, contained within their respective states, federal courts have a slightly different system. There are federal district courts everywhere, and the Supreme Court is clearly the end. The federal Courts of Appeals though are divided into 13 circuits, 12 of which cover a certain geographic area. New Mexico, for example, since it is where I am, is in the 10th circuit, along with Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. D.C. has it's own federal circuit. The 13th circuit is the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction for certain subject areas. It sits in D.C.

So that was long winded and not a clear as I'd hoped, but it's a start. Next time I will take about how to find case law, the various books one would use. Tune in then kids, same bat time, same bat station.