On 12th March, DJ Freeman (now Kendall Freeman) hosted a seminar on United States case law, the aim of which was to give an overview of how the US judicial system works, and tips on searching Lexis and locating free Internet sources. The multiplicity of US court systems can make researching case law fairly complex, so this seminar was useful and informative, especially for those like me who are not very experienced in locating US legal materials.

The US judicial system

Adam Fleisher, an attorney from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, gave the first talk of the evening, beginning with a broad overview of the hierarchy of courts and the jursidictional conditions that must be met before a court can hear a case.

He went on to explain the rules governing joinder, the joining of several causes of action or parties in one civil lawsuit, and the appeals system. The US system follows a Common Law approach which, like the UK, evolves on a case-by-case basis through the growth of precedent. However, deferring to precedent is considered a more conservative approach and other modes of argument such as ethics, economics and history are usually brought into play.

Adam finished by explaining a little bit about the powers given by Congress to federal administrative agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to enforce and adjudicate federal laws.

Lexis.com

The next speaker, John Collingwood from Lexis-Nexis, described the main features of the fee-based web product Lexis.com.

One of the most important aspects of Lexis is its extensive coverage; it has a substantial retrospective library of Federal and State cases back to 1750, and Supreme Court cases are loaded within an hour of being published.

Lexis has made it easier to find cases in a number of ways. Using a classification scheme of 4,000 US legal topics, Lexis editors select the key legal points of each case, known as "Core Concepts", and put these in headnotes. Furthermore, concise summaries analyse the procedural history of the case, give an overview of the facts and the outcome of the case. Shepard's system of noting-up is in place to check a case is still good law.
The information is well organised and reliable, and contrasts considerably with those free access sites mentioned below. But, as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for.

Free access websites

Roger Cook, Head of Information at Mayer Brown Rowe and Maw LLP, was the last speaker of the evening, and he showed us a few of the more obvious free-to-access websites. A respectable amount of primary legal materials are in the public domain, it is just a matter of knowing where to find them.

The main US Federal Court site is at http://www.uscourts.gov/, and here there is information about the various different courts across the US, with links to their websites.

Supreme Court Opinions are accessible through the Supreme Court site: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/, and on the Findlaw portal: http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html. Compared to the official court site, Findlaw has a better search facility, allowing for a crude sort of Shepardization.

Roger went on to describe a couple of sites for obtaining decisions from appellate or trial courts. Collected together at http://www.law.emory.edu/caselaw/ are links to the 11 Circuit Courts, and at http://www.courts.net there is a directory of State Courts. The coverage of cases on court websites varies from court to court and across States.