United States Reports

The official edition of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, began with a volume of decisions prepared and published by Alexander J. Dallas, a Philadelphia lawyer and occasional journalist and editor. The volume, entitled Reports of Cases Ruled and Adjudged in the Courts of Pennsylvania, Before and Since the Revolution, was printed in Philadelphia by Thomas Bradford in 1790. Paradoxically, the volume contained only Pennsylvania decisions since the federal Supreme Court had not yet decided any cases. The next three volumes of reports by Dallas (in 1798, 1799, and 1807, respectively) included decisions of the Supreme Court as well as of the lower federal courts and Pennsylvania courts. The 1790 volume has long been treated as the first of a series that later became known as the U.S. Reports.

Although the position of reporter of the Supreme Court was not authorized until an 1817 act of Congress provided for the post with an annual salary, the earlier reports were issued with the Court's approval. Since the early reports, following English tradition, were known and cited by the names of their respective reporters, they are called nominative or nominate reports. Court‐appointed reporters have continued to prepare the decisions for publication, although only the first ninety volumes of the series are still designated by the reporter's name, as listed in Table 1.

The U.S. Reports were issued by private publishers until 1922 when the U.S. Government Printing Office assumed publication, beginning with volume 257 covering the October term, 1921.

Prior to the issuance of each bound volume of the United States Reports, the court's decisions appear in two temporary, official forms: the slip decision, in which each decision appears separately in an individually paginated pamphlet, and the preliminary print, an advance sheet format that groups a number of decisions in pamphlets with continuous (and permanent) pagination through the three pamphlets that currently make up each bound volume. In 1990, through an experimental program called “Project Hermes,” the Court began providing electronic access to its decisions to a variety of organizations and publishers on the same day the decision is issued.

Virtually all of the commercial forms of publication of the Court's decisions (e.g., Lawyers' Edition; LEXIS; Supreme Court Reporter; United States Law Week; and WESTLAW) offer faster and more sophisticated access than the U.S. Reports. Nevertheless, the official report must be cited in briefs and memoranda to the Court and is traditionally given first in citations to decisions.

See also Reporting of Opinions.

— Morris L. Cohen

All decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are recorded in an authorized publication, the United States Reports. This series of volumes was initially compiled by Alexander J. Dallas, the Court's first reporter (1790–1800). Dallas's work was approved by the Court, although he held no official position and sold the publication of his work for profit. The position of reporter of the Supreme Court was not established by Congress until 1816.

Private publishers issued the United States Reports until 1922. Since then, the U.S. Government Printing Office has been the publisher.

The Court's decisions are not reported exclusively in the United States Reports. They also appear, for example, in Supreme Court Reporter; United States Law Week, a weekly publication that covers Supreme Court news and proceedings, including the full text of all Court decisions on cases; and the legal databases LEXIS and WESTLAW. However, the only official report of the Court's decisions is in United States Reports. This is the version that must be cited in all briefs and memoranda to the Court, and it should be listed first in any multiple listing of Sources of a citation.

See also Reporter of decisions

Volumes of the United States Reports on the shelf at a law library

The United States Reports are the official record of the rulings, orders, case tables, and other proceedings of the Supreme Court of the United States. Opinions of the court in each case, 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 Printing Office.

Contents 1 Citation 2 History 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Citation

For lawyers, citations to U.S. Reports are the standard reference for Supreme Court decisions. Under the commonly accepted citation protocol, the case Brown, et al., v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas is cited thus:

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

This citation indicates that the decision of the Court in the case entitled Brown v. Board of Education (as properly abbreviated per the aforementioned citation protocol), decided in 1954, can be found beginning at page 483 of volume 347 of the United States Reports.

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: Dallas's Reports, Cranch's Reports, etc.

None of the decisions appearing in the first volume and most of the second volume of United States Reports is actually a decision of the United States Supreme Court. Instead, they are decisions from various Pennsylvania courts, dating from the colonial period and the first decade after Independence. Alexander Dallas, a lawyer and journalist, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had been in the business of 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; and, when the Supreme Court began hearing cases, he added those cases to his reports, starting towards the end of the second volume, 2 Dallas Reports, with West v. Barnes (1791). 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,^[2] 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, creating the United States Reports. The earlier, private reports were retroactively numbered volumes 1–90 of the U.S. Reports, starting from the first volume of Dallas Reports.^[3] 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

• Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States
• Complete list of United States Supreme Court cases

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. ^ Act of Mar. 3, 1817, ch. 63, 3 Stat. 376.
3. ^ Hall, Kermit, ed. Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford 1992), p 215, 727

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: United States Reports

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: United States Reports

• United States Supreme Court: Information About Opinions
• United States Supreme Court: Opinions
• United States Supreme Court: Bound Volumes - Lists of PDFs

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