What are the names of the two reporters containing current decisions of the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals?

Court opinions are gathered together and published in chronological order in print in volumes called Case Reporters, or simply Reporters. Even though most cases are now available online, cases are still organized and cited to according to the print reporter system.

Case reporters can be official or unofficial. However, the text of the cases within the reporters are still considered primary sources (apart from any editorial additions in unofficial reporters such as headnotes), regardless of the cases' publication within an official or unofficial reporter.

• Official Reporters are governmentally approved publications which reproduce the reported cases within a given jurisdiction. Many states still publish their own reporters. The official reporter is the reporter that should be cited when submitting documents to the court in that jurisdiction.
   
• Unofficial Reporters also reproduce the reported cases within a given jurisdiction. However, they are published by commercial publishers (such as West, Lexis, BNA) and are generally considered unofficial reporters. Unofficial reporters may include editorial enhancements, such as headnotes, in addition to the text of the opinion.
  • A headnote is a brief summary of a specific point of law decided in a case.
  • Headnotes appear before the judicial opinion and are generally written by a publisher's editors.
  • Headnotes are a great research tool but are not considered legal authority and should never be cited to.

Reporters frequently have multiple series, which simply means the publisher re-started the volume numbering over again.

• For example, the North Eastern Reporter Second Series (N.E.2d) contains volumes 1 through 999; the North Eastern Reporter Third Series (N.E.3d) starts over again with volume 1. Reporters with no series indicator are in their first series.
• Note that "2d" and "3d" are used in legal citations instead of "2nd" and "3rd." All other ordinal abbreviations follow the usual format (1st, 4th, etc.).
• Cases are not reprinted from one series to the next; each subsequent series contains all new cases.

What Cases are Published in Reporters?

At the State level: When you are reading state case law in a reporter, generally the decision will be from an appellate court (either at an intermediate or supreme court level).

• Many, but certainly not all, appellate decisions are reported (published).

• In some states, such as California or New York, some trial-level cases are published but those are exceptions.

At the Federal level:  You may be reading either trial or appellate-level cases in reporters.

• The trial level cases are binding on no one but the parties involved, are used only for persuasive purposes, and are not precedental.

• The appellate level decisions are binding to some extent on all trial courts within its district and itself.

Case law reporting in US Courts

The Federal Reporter (ISSN 1048-3888) is a case law reporter in the United States that is published by West Publishing and a part of the National Reporter System.[1] It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre-1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter, Federal Cases. The fourth and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though the Federal Reporter is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformly cite to the Federal Reporter for included decisions.[2] Approximately 30 new volumes are published each year.[1]

Distinctions

The Federal Reporter has always published decisions only from federal courts lower than the Supreme Court of the United States, but not the Supreme Court itself. Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court are published in one official reporter and two unofficial reporters, which are, respectively, the United States Reports, Supreme Court Reports (a National Reporter System member published by West), and the United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition.

Beginning in 1932, West stopped publishing federal district court cases in the Federal Reporter and began to publish them in a separate reporter, the Federal Supplement.[1]

Features and print format

The Federal Reporter organizes court opinions within each volume by the date of the decision, and includes the full official text of the court's opinion. West editors add headnotes that summarize key principles of law in the cases, and Key Numbers that classify the decisions by topic within the West American Digest System.

Only decisions designated by the courts as "for publication—those with full precedential value for which citation in court filings is permissible—are included in the Federal Reporter. "Unpublished" decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals may be found in the Federal Appendix, also published by West. New opinions are first issued by West in weekly pamphlets called "Advance Sheets", to be eventually supplanted by the final hardbound, successively numbered volumes. Three series of Federal Reporter have been published to date, with the fourth series started in June 2021.

Series

Federal Reporter, Second Series

Federal Reporter, Third Series

Federal Reporter, Fourth Series

Electronic sources

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Federal Reporter

The Federal Reporter, including its supplementary material, is also available at websites including OpenJurist.org, on CD-ROM compilations, and on West's online legal database, Westlaw. Because individual court cases are identified by case citations that consist of printed page and volume numbers, the electronic text of the opinions incorporates the page numbers of the printed volumes with "star pagination" formatting—the numbers are boldfaced within brackets and with asterisks prepended (i.e., [*4]) to stand out from the rest of the text.

Though West has copyright over its original headnotes and keynotes, the opinions themselves are public domain and accordingly may be found in other sources, chiefly Lexis, Westlaw's primary competitor. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has also ruled that Lexis can copy the page numbers from the Federal Reporter to allow for proper citation without violating West's copyright.[6]

Notes

1. ^ a b c Olson, Kent C. (1999). Legal Information How to Find It, How to Use it. Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press. p. 185. ISBN 9780897749633.
2. ^ Barkan, Steven M.; Bintliff, Barbara A.; Whisner, Mary (2015). Fundamentals of Legal Research (10th ed.). St. Paul: Foundation Press. p. 68. ISBN 9781609300562.
3. ^ This court was redesignated as the United States Court of Federal Claims in 1993.
4. ^ The United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals was subsequently merged into the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
5. ^ United States district court opinions after 1932 are covered in the Federal Supplement, also published by West.
6. ^ See Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publ. Co., 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1999).

External links

• Official website

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Federal_Reporter&oldid=1105545759"