Winning Research Skills - Westlaw

Chapter 2
■ Where the official reporter is published by a government agency and an unofficial reporter is
published by a commercial publisher such as West, the unofficial reporter may be more
current. For a very recent case, therefore, an unofficial citation may be the only one available.
■ Students and attorneys often prefer to use a West reporter even when it is not the official
reporter because West editorial enhancements (e.g., case synopses, headnotes, and topic and
key number indexing) enable them to work more efficiently.
Unreported Opinions
You may be surprised to learn that the great majority of federal and state judicial opinions are
not reported at all. Sometimes an opinion is not reported because the court deems it redundant
of previous decisions; other opinions are not reported because they are determined to lack
precedential value. Court rules in each jurisdiction indicate when reporting of an opinion is
necessary or desirable, and the rules vary among jurisdictions. Nearly all the decisions of courts
of last resort within the state and federal system are reported in full.
Most state trial-level cases are not reported. In fact, most trial court actions do not produce a
written opinion at all. Trial transcripts and documents filed with the clerk of court make up a
record of the action. These materials may be available as public records, but they are rarely
published.
A very high percentage of federal district court opinions are not reported. In fact, not all federal
appellate cases are reported. The trend has been to report fewer opinions on a percentage basis.
Because the absolute number of cases being decided continues to rise, however, a large number
of opinions are reported.
Many opinions not designated for inclusion in the reporters are nevertheless available online and
in print sources, such as West’s Federal Appendix. There has been much debate in legal circles as
to whether unreported opinions can serve as precedent; that is, whether they can be cited as
authority. Some jurisdictions permitted citation of unreported opinions, while other permitted
citation only in limited circumstances or prohibited it entirely. In April 2006, the U.S. Supreme
Court adopted Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1, which provides that unpublished
federal judicial opinions, orders, judgments, or other written dispositions issued on or after
January 1, 2007, may be cited in the federal courts. The courts are free to decide the precedential
weight of the unpublished decisions, but they may not prohibit their citation.
Even when they have no or limited precedential authority, unreported opinions can help you
understand an issue and determine judicial thinking. If you are going before Judge Smith in a
products liability case, for example, it may be valuable to know what Judge Smith has done
before in similar cases. It may also be useful to know what parties have been involved in prior
litigation and what arguments were considered. In law school and in practice, unreported cases
have many uses.
Organization of Cases
Cases reported by West are organized by court, jurisdiction, or geographic proximity. The
arrangement of cases is determined by West attorney-editors. For example, in a regional reporter
(a reporter that includes decisions from the courts of a particular region composed of several
states) cases from a particular state are grouped together. The arrangement of a state’s cases in a
10 Winning Research Skills