United States Reports

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Volumes of the United States Reports United States Reports.jpg
Volumes of the United States Reports

The United States Reports ( ISSN   0891-6845) are the official record (law reports) of the Supreme Court of the United States. They include rulings, orders, case tables (list of every case decided), in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner (the losing party in lower courts) and by the name of the respondent (the prevailing party below), and other proceedings. United States Reports, once printed and bound, are the final version of court opinions and cannot be changed.

Contents

Opinions of the court in each case are prepended with a headnote prepared by the Reporter of Decisions, and any concurring or dissenting opinions are published sequentially. The Court's Publication Office oversees the binding and publication of the volumes of United States Reports, although the actual printing, binding, and publication are performed by private firms under contract with the United States Government Publishing Office.

Citation

For lawyers, citations to United States Reports are the standard reference for Supreme Court decisions. Following The Bluebook , a commonly accepted citation protocol, the case Brown, et al., v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, for example, would be cited as:

Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

This citation indicates that the decision of the Court in the case entitled Brown v. Board of Education, as abbreviated in Bluebook style for footnotes, was decided in 1954 and can be found in volume 347 of the United States Reports starting on page 483.

History

The early volumes of the United States Reports were originally published privately by the individual Supreme Court Reporters. As was the practice in England, the reports were designated by the names of the reporters who compiled them, such as Dallas's Reports and Cranch's Reports.

The decisions appearing in the entire first volume and most of the second volume of United States Reports are not decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Instead, they are decisions from various Pennsylvania courts, dating from the colonial era and the first decade after American independence. Alexander Dallas, a lawyer and journalist, in Philadelphia, had been reporting these cases for newspapers and periodicals. He subsequently began compiling his case reports in a bound volume, which he called Reports of cases ruled and adjudged in the courts of Pennsylvania, before and since the Revolution. [1] This would come to be known as the first volume of Dallas Reports.

When the United States Supreme Court, along with the rest of the new Federal Government moved, in 1791, from New York City to the nation's temporary capital in Philadelphia, Dallas was appointed the Supreme Court's first unofficial, and unpaid, Supreme Court Reporter. Court reporters in that age received no salary, but were expected to profit from the publication and sale of their compiled decisions. Dallas continued to collect and publish Pennsylvania decisions in a second volume of his Reports.

When the U.S. Supreme Court began to hear cases, he added those cases to his reports, starting near the end of the second volume, 2 Dallas Reports, with West v. Barnes (1791). As Lawrence M. Friedman has explained: "In this volume, quietly and unobtrusively, began that magnificent series of reports, extending in an unbroken line to the present, that chronicles the work of the world's most powerful court." [2] Dallas went on to publish a total of four volumes of decisions during his tenure as Reporter.

When the Supreme Court moved to Washington, D.C. in 1800, Dallas remained in Philadelphia, and William Cranch took over as unofficial reporter of decisions. In 1817, Congress made the Reporter of Decisions an official, salaried position, [3] although the publication of the Reports remained a private enterprise for the reporter's personal gain. The reports themselves were the subject of an early copyright case, Wheaton v. Peters , in which former reporter Henry Wheaton sued then current reporter Richard Peters for reprinting cases from Wheaton's Reports in abridged form.

In 1874, the U.S. government began to fund the reports' publication (18  Stat.   204), creating the United States Reports. The earlier, private reports were retroactively numbered volumes 1–90 of the United States Reports, starting from the first volume of Dallas Reports. [4] Therefore, decisions appearing in these early reports have dual citation forms: one for the volume number of the United States Reports, and one for the set of nominate reports. For example, the complete citation to McCulloch v. Maryland is 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819).

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Case citation</span> System for uniquely identifying individual rulings of a court

Case citation is a system used by legal professionals to identify past court case decisions, either in series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a neutral style that identifies a decision regardless of where it is reported. Case citations are formatted differently in different jurisdictions, but generally contain the same key information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States</span>

The reporter of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States is the official charged with editing and publishing the opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States, both when announced and when they are published in permanent bound volumes of the United States Reports. The reporter is responsible for only the contents of the United States Reports issued by the Government Publishing Office, first in preliminary prints and later in the final bound volumes. The reporter is not responsible for the editorial content of unofficial reports of the court's decisions, such as the privately published Supreme Court Reporter and Lawyers' Edition.

<i>United States Reports</i>, volume 1

This is a list of cases reported in volume 1 of United States Reports, decided by various Pennsylvania courts from 1754 to 1789.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Reports, volume 2</span>

This is a list of cases reported in volume 2 U.S. of United States Reports, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States from 1791 to 1793. Case reports from other federal and state tribunals also appear in 2 U.S..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Reports, volume 3</span>

This is a list of cases reported in volume 3 U.S. of United States Reports, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States from 1794 to 1799. Case reports from other tribunals also appear in 3 U.S..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Reports, volume 4</span>

This is a list of cases reported in volume 4 U.S. of United States Reports, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1799 and 1800. Case reports from other tribunals also appear in 4 U.S..

Lessee of Hyam v. Edwards, is the title of two separate decisions of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, issued when Pennsylvania was still a British colony. The first decision is found at 1 U.S. 1 and is the first decision that appears in the first volume of United States Reports. The second decision is found at 1 U.S. 2.

Lessee of Weston v Stammers, 1 U.S. 2 and Lessee of Lewis v. Stammers, 1 U.S. 2 are decisions of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, issued when Pennsylvania was still a British colony. They are among the first decisions that appear in the first volume of United States Reports.

Hewes v. M'Dowell, 1 U.S. 5 is a decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, issued when Pennsylvania was still a British colony. It is among the first decisions that appear in the first volume of United States Reports.

Nixon v. Long, 1 U.S. 6 is a decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, issued when Pennsylvania was still a British colony. It is among the first decisions that appear in the first volume of United States Reports.

The King v. Haas, 1 U.S. 9 is a decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania issued when Pennsylvania was still a British colony. It is among the first decisions that appear in the first volume of United States Reports, and is among the earliest appellate court reports in North America. It is also one of the first reported appellate cases to apply the writ of habeas corpus, then an established principle of English law, in the English colonies that later became the first thirteen states of the United States of America.

Lessee of Albertson v. Robeson, 1 U.S. 9 is a decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, issued when Pennsylvania was still a British colony. It is among the first decisions that appear in the first volume of United States Reports.

References

  1. Cohen, Morris and O'Connor, Sharon H. A Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States, (Fred B. Rothman & Co, Littleton Colorado, 1995)
  2. Friedman, Lawrence M. (2019). A History of American Law (4th ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 308–310. ISBN   9780190070915 . Retrieved November 7, 2020.
  3. Act of March 3, 1817, ch. 63, 3  Stat.   376.
  4. Hall, Kermit, ed. Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford 1992), p 215, 727