Knight Chair in Investigative & Enterprise Reporting
‘Worst-performing judge’ — continued:
Finding the opinions
Each state posts virtually the same type of information in generally the same format, and they have their own free-of-charge data, but ways of getting to it differ. First try Findlaw at http://www.findlaw.com/11stategov. This Web site will give you a list of all the states, and it has detailed information on New York, California and Texas.
Another service is Lexis-Nexis, a fee-based service, which has well-organized appellate decisions from each state. However, the Illinois students found that the original free-of-charge Web sites occasionally had more information than Lexis-Nexis. There was one big hangup regarding some information from the courts and Lexis-Nexis. Occasionally documents did not contain the name of the judge who heard the original case in the lower court; hoever, they could be found elsewhere.
The students always took the opinion off of the official Web site instead of a service unless the service had more information on each case.
In some states the judge was not named, but the class was able to get the case information from books in the local law library. The courts publish the opinions on a regular basis, and they are on the shelves of any law library. It looks like reporters in those states occasionally will have to leave their desks after all. The books are a product of The National Reporter System and they are individually called "South Reporter 2d," "Southeastern Reporter 2d," "Northeastern Reporter 2d," etc. Each contains recent cases from a group of states.
If there was no judge named on the Internet document or the books, the investigation called for a two-step approach. The reporter may have to trace the court file number of the appellate court through the lower court system to identify the judge, which is difficult and time consuming.
Select a state to find out how to search its opinions: