This site provides coverage of case decisions from all Federal, State and District of Columbia Courts. All of the content is a matter of public record. FindACase™ does not contain statutes or regulations.
FindACase™ offers extensive online access to federal and state case decisions.
You may review a brief excerpt of any case listed in your search results for free. As a subscriber you will receive access to the complete text of decisions from our entire database.
The FindACase™ home page defaults to a “Simple Search.” A Simple Search will search for all of the words you provide in the search box. Just enter the keywords you are researching into the box and click “Search!”. The search will cover all jurisdictions for that term. You will receive a list of up to 1,000 results to review.
If you want to search a specific court or jurisdiction, change the search type to “Advanced Search”. The search page that will allow you to select a search type of either “Boolean” or “Citation” and jurisdiction for your search.
A citation search can be accomplished by entering the citation into the Simple Search query box, by selecting “citation” for search type on the advanced search page, or by using a Boolean search on the Advanced Search page.
Simple Search. To search for an opinion when you have the citation enter the citation the search field. Make sure you have the punctuation correct before proceeding.
For example, to find United States v. Tohono O’odham Nation, 559 F. 3d 1284 (Fed. Cir. 2009), using a simple search, enter the following in the search query box:
559 F. 3d 1284
This search will retrieve the opinion cited only.
Citation Search. For a quick and easy method for searching by a document's official citation, choose Citation next to Search Type at the top of the Advanced Search page and enter the citation in the search box. You can choose to search All jurisdictions or just one. For this type of search, it is also important to use the proper format, including spaces and punctuation. This search will retrieve the opinion cited and will also retrieve other opinions that cited to the opinion. Thus, you have the ability to follow the opinion's subsequent history.
NOTE: While you can search for an opinion by its citation, it is advantageous to know the parties involved as well since the document will appear for review without any citation or docket number listed. Results are sorted by relevance, so the cited case may not be listed first.
Boolean/Fielded Search. From the Advanced Search screen, choose Boolean search type. Then enter the citation in the search box at the top in this format: (cite contains xxx) where xxx is the citation. Using the example above, the box would read: (cite contains 559 F. 3d 1284). The citation must be in proper format and the parentheses must be used. Use this type of search for opinions at least six months old; newer opinions will not yet have official citations.
An opinion's citation includes the name of the reporter in which it is "published"; there are state and regional reporters. The regional reporters listed below show the states that are covered for each:
Atlantic (A., A.2d) – Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont
North Eastern (N.E., N.E.2d) – Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio
North Western (N.W., N.W.2d) – Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, N. Dakota, S. Dakota, Wisconsin
Pacific (P., P.2d, P.3d) – Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming
Southern (So., So.2d) – Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi
South Eastern (S.E., S.E.2d) – Georgia, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia
South Western (S.W., S.W.2d, S.W.3d) – Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas
To find opinions on certain topics or points of law, you can use two different methods: 1) simple search or 2) employing a Boolean search.
Simple Search. This parameter searches for documents in which all the search words are present, in any order. The search presumes "and" between each word of the search. Use this technique for broad topic search. The non-advanced search uses this model.
Advanced Search: Boolean. A variety of options are available to you in a Boolean search (available on the Advanced Search page), allowing you to search with the use of connectors, wild card characters and fielded searches.
Connectors:
and -- both words must be present: medical and negligence
or -- either word can be present: medical or scientific
w/n -- first word occurs within a specified number of words of the second word: negligence w/10 surgery
and not -- first word occurs, but not second: malpractice and not medical
Wildcards:
question mark (?) -- replaces a single character: appl? would find apple or apply but not apples or application, among others
asterisk (*) -- replaces any number of characters: judg* would find judge, judges, judgment, etc.
Fielded Searches:
(cite contains xxx) -- retrieves specific opinion: (cite contains 102 S. Ct. 3034).
(parties contains xxx) -- retrieves opinions with specified party names: (parties contains florio)
Content carried on this site is public information, and is acquired from courts in all states and federal jurisdictions. The entirety of this information constitutes a set of documents held in the public domain, which collectively form an appellate record. We maintain this set of documents to serve the public in matters of legal research. FindACase(tm) is one of many online and print sources for such cases.
To ensure the continued utility of this public domain resource, we will not remove a record from the public domain, nor will we redact any portion of it, without written request or a court order from an appropriate court of authority.
When a court "seals" a decision, it does not intend to remove it from the appellate record. It intends, rather, to direct its own personnel, typically the Clerk of the Court, to cease making that opinion available to the public through the court, i.e., it will no longer be available at the Court's counter and will no longer be available electronically on the Court's system. "Sealing" a document does not remove the opinion from the appellate record, especially in the instance of an opinion which has received a citation.
Upon receiving a written request, FindACase will prevent the identified opinion from appearing within both FindACase and public search engine results for FindACase using robots.txt protocol. This will eliminate the opinion from showing up in public search engine results for FindACase. Please note, we have no control over how long it will take for the link to be removed from search engines once the robots.txt protocol has been applied.
We are a private company carrying public domain documents released by government entities to the public; we carry nothing that is not in the public domain. Other private companies carry these same documents and we all do so under the protection of Cox Broad. Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U.S. 469 (1975), the case line of authority from Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
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