30. The digests as indexes

The biggest problem with chronological case publication is that there is no easy way of finding cases in the same subject area. The main tools for doing this are the "Digests". Digests are very nearly literally named, as the editors devour whole cases and provide the reader with compact summaries of points of law within those cases. Digests may be seen as annotated subject indexes to case law.

Digests first divide the whole of legal knowledge into a subject classification system. Within each subject division, there are subdivisions, which modern editors have attempted to keep parallel, but different areas of the law are not so easily meshed. But overall, since the initial subject is relatively small, the subdivisions are usually acceptable.

32. The case summaries

Under each subdivision the summaries of points of law in that area will be listed, arranged with the highest courts first, and in reverse chronological order. This means that the most recent and most important cases are the first a reader encounters. Traditionally the summaries have been the whole relevant case compressed as tightly as possible. As cases tended to broaden in content and have a number of issues within, the digest editors attempted to extract a key point and summarize it, and place the different point at the appropriate places within the digest. For the digests published by West the summaries have come to duplicate the headnotes of cases as found in the West published case reporters.

33. The Decennial Digest

The national Digest is the Decennial Digest, published by West. It too is a product of the late 1880's, with the first permanent part covering from the earliest colonial cases (1658) through 1896. A supplemental digest cumulatively covering the previous 10 years appeared in 1906, and the decennial structure was born.

34. Keeping up-to-date

The material received before the ten year cumulations is known as the General Digest. The general digest is non-cumulative, and covers all subject entries in each volume, with a table at the end to tell you which entries are to be found in which volumes. In a sense it acts as an "advance sheet" to the main digest set. The same publisher's computer system, Westlaw, can also be used as an electronic digest.

35. State digests

The national digest is very awkward and inconvenient. The problem is avoided in most jurisdictions by the publication of regional and state digests. Since questions are usually posited in reference to a particular jurisdiction, it is much more efficient to use the digest which best covers that jurisdiction and as little else as possible. For example, New York State has its own digest, West's New York Digest Third (meaning third edition). As a general rule, the more populous a state, and the more important a state is as an economic center, the more likely it is to have its own digest.

36. West's "Key Number" system

West is extraordinarily proud of its "Key Number" system, which is a way to tie together its various products. Within each subject division of the West digests, the subdivisions are assigned numbers, each with a little key insignia in front of it. Each of these is said to represent a narrow legal concept. The headnotes in the case reporters, the annotations in the annotated statutes, and the digest entries all share this scheme, making work among them a little bit easier.

37. Other access methods

Other tools can be used to access case law as well. If you are looking for cases which interpret a particular statute, the ANNOTATED STATUTES provide the most convenient access. If you want to find the key cases in a general subject area, you might look at the footnotes in the relevant "hornbook" or treatise. If you need to find a particular case, one would look in the TABLE OF CASES of the appropriate digest. The major caselaw computer systems, such as Lexis, Lois, and Westlaw, encourage full-text word searching using either boolean logic or natural language searching algorithms. There is no free website with the breadth and depth of the commercial systems yet.