History 369: Race and the Law in American History

Oyez is a free website that includes brief descriptions and the full text of the opinions for many (but not all) Supreme Court case decided from the Court’s beginning in 1789 to the present. This is often the easiest place to go to find an opinion quickly. Note that Oyez will sometimes link you to a partner site, Justia.com, which is a commercial site but still reliable. For cases from 1955 on, Oyez frequently includes links to the audio recordings of oral arguments.

Justia is a commercial legal information site. Its Supreme Court Center includes a comprehensive collection of Supreme Court opinions. It’s often one of the first search results when you Google the name of a case and is a reliable source for accessing a case quickly. Justia also includes information about state and federal law beyond the Supreme Court, though the site overall is more oriented toward people doing legal research than to historians.

CourtListener is a massive, free archive of legal materials, sponsored by the Free Law Project. If you are looking for a state court decision or a federal decision below the level of the Supreme Court, CourtListener is likely the easiest place to find it. For most cases, the site includes scans of the decisions as originally published; click on the “PDF” tab to access these. For older cases especially, the PDF of an opinion is generally preferable to the version transcribed into plain text, since the transcription relies on OCR (optical character recognition) that can be a bit wonky. Downsides to Court Listener: it can be slow. For some cases, the syllabus (the summary that precedes the decision) is not included, so you will have to go to Justia or another site to find it. CL also includes other filings and legal actions related to the case, as well as the decision itself, which can be a plus if you want more detail but a minus if you’re just trying to find the decision quickly.

Sponsored by Cornell Law School, this site is linked to Oyez and provides some of the same information as Justia. It frequently turns up when you Google a legal case. Many, but not all, Supreme Court opinions are included on the LII page; Justia is more comprehensive. An advantage of the LII site is that it also includes valuable reference material, including a detailed explanation of the Constitution and legal dictionary and encyclopedia.

Commercial site similar to Justia and Legal Information Institute. Its case law page makes it especially easy to access the U.S. Code, as well as courts by state.

HeinOnline has much of the same content as WestLaw, but it includes more law review articles and supporting materials. If you just want to find the legal materials relevant to your case, you might have an easier time using WestLaw. If you want to get a broader sense of what has been written about your case by scholars, you might benefit from using HeinOnline. When it comes to the actual cases themselves, HeinOnline will bring you to a PDF of the original printed version, while WestLaw takes you to a digitized version. HeinOnline also uses the more familiar U.S. Reports citation system, rather than the Supreme Court Reporter system used in WestLaw.

The website of the Supreme Court includes useful material primarily related to recent cases. You can find argument transcripts dating back to 1968; audio recordings of arguments starting from 2010; PDFs of opinions since 1991. Use U.S. Reports via the Library of Congress (linked below) for earlier opinions.

United States Reports is a series of bound volumes constituting the official record of the U.S. Supreme Court. This Library of Congress site collects PDFs of these volumes. This site is a great place to go if you want to see the opinions from your case as they originally appeared in print. This site is difficult to use; it helps if you already know the volume number in which your case appeared. This is the first number in the official citation of a Supreme Court case. For instance, Dred Scott’s citation is 60 US 393, which means it is in U.S. Reports volume 60, starting at page 393. You can find your case’s citation by searching in Oyez or Justia. U.S. Reports covers court decisions from 1754 (confusingly, before the Supreme Court was even established--these early volumes cover Pennsylvania court decisions) through 2003. For more recent material, go to the Supreme Court website, linked above.

This project from Harvard Law School provides browsable access to all U.S. (and colonial) official published case law going back to 1658, including all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. This material is searchable via CourtListener.