28. States court structures follow the federal model

As with legislation, the states tend to follow the federal model. There is usually a reporter for the highest court, and for the appellate courts. However, very few states publish the opinions of their trial level courts. Many states are now putting current appellate decisions on the web as well as printing them on paper, but their practices are not uniform. Some, such as the Oklahoma Supreme Court have a sophisticated system and have put up all their cases back to 1916 and have a program to eventually mount all cases from their beginnings as a state. Others, such as the Nevada Supreme Court,, only keep them on the court site for 90 days after issuance. (This could not be confirmed as of June 7th, 2004, since there were no cases available on a revamped site). The exact names of all of these reporters are listed in the tables of the BlueBook.

29. The National Reporter System

In addition to the reporters for the individual states, there is a large set, published by West, known as the National Reporter System which publishes the cases of the highest courts of all the states, and many of the cases from the appellate courts of the states. It is broken into regional sets, very loosely named for the particular region. The North Eastern Reporter, for example, covers Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York and Ohio. The Pacific Reporter covers the states along the Pacific Coast and the southwest United States. The editorial style and elements of the National Reporter System replicate those of the West federal products, creating a fairly uniform method of reporting cases. All of these West products started being published in the late 1800's, and are now in their second or third series.