25. The Supreme Court

The decisions of the Supreme Court are the most important cases in the United States. The draft decisions are available on the day they are issued on the web, but in paper they are published, very slowly, in an official reporter known as the United States Reports. The form followed in printing these cases is the basic form used in all reporters. The private publishers such as West Publishing augment these basic elements with a lot of additional data and links which may be of use to a researcher.

The main parts of a case as reported are the name, the docket number, the headnotes or syllabus, the name of the judge writing the opinion, the text of the opinion, the names of the judge(s) writing concurring and/or dissenting opinions, and the concurring and/or dissenting opinions. The cases are published in chronological order of their issuance without any regard to subject matter. The advance sheets are distributed within a couple of months of the issuing of the decisions from the bench, but the hardcover versions are often not published until as much as two years later.

26. Unofficial reporters for the Supreme Court

Besides its own website, the Supreme Court has developed an electronic system known as "Hermes" to distribute cases electronically on the day they are issued. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell makes these cases available on the internet as soon as they are received. This is now the way the paper publishers also receive their texts. There are four unofficial paper reporters for the US Supreme Court. Two are published in looseleaf format for high speed mail distribution of the cases, BNA's US Law Week and CCH's Supreme Court Reports. Two others are distributed as more permanent substitutes for the official reporter, West's Supreme Court Reporter and Lexis's United States Reports, Lawyers' Edition.

27. The lower federal courts

The other main federal courts, the district and circuit courts, do not have a government published official reporter. The circuit court cases are published by West in a set known as the Federal Reporter, and the written decisions of the district courts are published by West in the Federal Supplement. These follow the same format as outlined above with the addition of headnotes created by the publisher following their "key number" system. The headnotes are short excerpts from the case capsulizing the points of law being made by that case. If the decision is on one narrow subject, there may be only one headnote. But most cases raise a number of points of law, so there will be number of headnotes. All of these cases are also available through the commercial computer services such as Lexis, Westlaw, and Lois. Many of the federal courts have also established websites with the more recent case law. The Emory University Law School Library has created a website which links to all the Federal Courts that have internet pages.