Corporate personhood or juridical personality is the legal notion that a juridical person such as a corporation, separately from its associated human beings, has at least some of the legal rights and responsibilities enjoyed by natural persons. In most countries, a corporation has the same rights as a natural person to hold property, enter into contracts, and to sue or be sued.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), is a corporate law case of the United States Supreme Court concerning taxation of railroad properties. The case is most notable for a headnote stating that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants constitutional protections to corporations.
Morrison Remick "Mott" Waite was an American attorney, jurist, and politician from Ohio. He served as the seventh chief justice of the United States from 1874 until his death in 1888. During his tenure, the Waite Court took a narrow interpretation of federal authority related to laws and amendments that were enacted during the Reconstruction Era to expand the rights of freedmen and protect them from attacks by white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
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 Printing 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.
Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 591 (1834), was the first United States Supreme Court ruling on copyright. The case upheld the power of Congress to make a grant of copyright protection subject to conditions and rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright in published works. The Court also declared that there could be no copyright in the Court's own judicial decisions.
National Broadcasting Co. v. United States, 319 U.S. 190 (1943), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Federal Communications Commission had the power to issue regulations pertaining to associations between broadcasting networks and their affiliated stations, otherwise known as "chain networks." The case is important in the development of American administrative law.
Law reports or reporters are series of books that contain judicial opinions from a selection of case law decided by courts. When a particular judicial opinion is referenced, the law report series in which the opinion is printed will determine the case citation format.
The United States Patents Quarterly (U.S.P.Q.) is a United States legal reporter published by the Bloomberg Industry Group in Washington, D.C. The U.S.P.Q. covers intellectual property cases including patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, from 1913 to the present. The publisher stopped the sequence of volume numbers and restarted with a second series, cited as U.S.P.Q. 2d (BNA), in 1987.
The United States Reports are the official record of the Supreme Court of the United States. They include rulings, orders, case tables, in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner and by the name of the respondent, and other proceedings. United States Reports, once printed and bound, are the final version of court opinions and cannot be changed. 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.
West's National Reporter System (NRS) is a set of case law reporters for federal courts and appellate state courts in the United States. It started with the North Western Reporter in 1879 which has its origin in The Syllabi.
The Federal Reporter is a case law reporter in the United States that is published by West Publishing and a part of the National Reporter System. It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre-1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter, Federal Cases. The fourth and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though the Federal Reporter is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformly cite to the Federal Reporter for included decisions. Approximately 30 new volumes are published each year.
The Federal Appendix was a case law reporter published by West Publishing from 2001 to 2021. It published judicial opinions of the United States courts of appeals that were not expressly selected or designated for publication. Such "unpublished" cases are ostensibly without value as precedent. However, the Supreme Court made a change to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure in 2006. Now, Rule 32.1 says that federal circuit courts are not allowed to prohibit the citation of unpublished opinions issued on or after January 1, 2007.
A headnote is a brief summary of a particular point of law that is added to the text of a court decision to aid readers in locating discussion of a legal issue in an opinion. As the term implies, headnotes appear at the beginning of the published opinion.
The Federal Supplement (ISSN 1047-7306 is a case law reporter published by West Publishing in the United States that includes select opinions of the United States district courts since 1932, and is part of the National Reporter System. Although the Federal Supplement is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the U.S. that legal professionals uniformly cite the Federal Supplement for included decisions. Approximately 40 new volumes are published per year.
Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U.S. 927 (1995), is a United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that the traditional, common-law-derived "knock and announce" rule for executing search warrants must be incorporated into the "reasonableness" analysis of whether the actual execution of the warrant is/was justified under the 4th Amendment. The high court thus ruled that the old "knock and announce" rule while not a hard requirement, was also not a dead letter.
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission v. United States, 568 U.S. 23 (2012), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that it was possible for government-induced, temporary flooding to constitute a "taking" of property under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, such that compensation could be owed to the owner of the flooded property.
The United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition, or Lawyers' Edition is an unofficial reporter of Supreme Court of the United States opinions. The Lawyers' Edition was established by the Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company of Rochester, New York in 1882, and features coverage of Supreme Court decisions going back to 1790. The first Lawyers' Edition series corresponds to the official United States Reports from volume 1 to volume 351, whereas the second series contains cases starting from the official reporter volume 352. It is currently published by LexisNexis.
In the legal profession, a Syllabus is a preliminary section of a court ruling that outlines the core facts and issues of the case and the path that the case has taken prior to reaching the present court.
Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), is a United States Supreme Court case regarding "whether the government edicts doctrine extends to—and thus renders uncopyrightable—works that lack the force of law, such as the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated" (OCGA). On April 27, 2020, the Court ruled 5–4 that the OCGA cannot be copyrighted because the OCGA's annotations were "authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties"; thus the Court found that the annotations fall under the government edicts doctrine and are ineligible for copyright.
