State Legal Research: General and Multi-Jurisdictional

Please review the Law Library's individual state resources guides which link directly to state courts case opinions found on Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg Law as well as on the courts' free websites.  AALL Online Legal Information Resources links to free online state appellate court opinions and provides the official status of the web version. The Law Library's state resources guides list the titles for the print court reports for each state.

For more on conducting case law research in a state (or states) by legal issue or topic, check the Finding Cases: Digests, Headnotes and Key Numbers page in the Law Library's Case Law Research Guide. 

• Digitized on HeinOnline State Reports: A Historical Archive
• Digitized on LLMC Digital (search by State then Judicial (by date))
• Transcribed and digitized by Caselaw Access Project (Harv. L. School):
  • State Reporters
  • Regional Reporters : The states covered in each regional reporter may be found in Case Law Research Guide: Print Case Reporters.
    • West's Atlantic Reporter, Second Series (A.2d) (1942-2010)
    • West's Atlantic Reporter, Third Series (A.3d) (2004-2019)
    • North Eastern Reporter, Second Series (N.E.2d) (1978-2014)
    • North Eastern Reporter, Third Series (N.E 3d) (2000-2019)
    • North Western Reporter, Second Series (N.W.2d) (1952-2019)
    • Pacific Reporter, Second Series (P.2d) (1939-2000)
    • Pacific Reporter, Third Series (P.3d) (1976-2019)
    • South Eastern Reporter, Second Series (S.E.2d) (1982-2019)
    • South Western Reporter (S.W.) (1900-1927)
    • South Western Reporter, Second Series (S.W.2d) (1920-1999)
    • South Western Reporter, Third Series (S.W.3d) (1993-2019)
    • Southern Reporter (So.) (1924-1941)
    • Southern Reporter, Second Series (So.2d) (1923-2009)
    • Southern Reporter, Third Series (2000-2019) (So.3d)
  • Full-text search available through CourtListener (Per Caselaw Access Project: "All use restrictions for the Caselaw Access Project’s data have officially been lifted. To consolidate efforts and make space for future projects at the Library Innovation Lab, we have partnered with our good friends at CourtListener to provide search for the corpus.")
  • Proprietary headnotes are omitted or redacted from the digitized copies.

Dockets

• Some state court dockets may be found in:
  • Lexis: Dockets.
  •  Westlaw: Dockets: Search Coverage Status by Court or Dockets Index to determine coverage for Georgetown Law accounts. Search Dockets and Court Wire to determine which court materials are covered by the two Westlaw services. Georgetown Law does not have access to Court Wire, but does to Court Wire Alert Archive.
  • Bloomberg Law Docket Search: Search Dockets Coverages & Outages for coverage. Docket coverage does not mean, however, that all filings within the coverage dates are held by Bloomberg Law. Also, review our Law Library's FAQ on fees and Bloomberg Law's Docket Search.
• Try searching for dockets on the court's web site. The National Center for State Courts offers judicial branch links for each state, focusing on the administrative office of the courts, the court of last resort, any intermediate appellate courts, and each trial court level.

Court Records & Documents

• CourtLink and  Briefs, Pleadings and Motions may be found on Lexis.
• Some Briefs and Trial Court Documents may be available on Westlaw.
• To locate state court materials not available within Westlaw, Lexis or Bloomberg Law, review Dockets & Court Documents page in our Briefs, Oral Arguments and Other Court Documents Research Guide.
• Some state appellate courts may make recordings of oral arguments and hearings available on their web sites.
• The Law Library's ILL Services, a library-to-library resource sharing service, does not order court materials from a court's clerk. Please contact the court directly for copies.

Court Structures and Statistics

• State Court Structures: Offered by the National Center for State Courts, one to six states can be compared for their appellate and trial court structures, case loads, population size and more.
• CSP Stat: Offered by the Court Statistics Project, providing annual state court caseloads.
• Book of States: Published by The Council of State Governments, provides annual summary of statistics in tables and as infographics for each state's courts of last resort, intermediate appellate courts and trial courts, including number of judges, years of term, method of selection, qualifications, and compensation and responsible offices for judicial discipline.

Court Rules

• Lexis: Statutes & Legislation: Court Rules: Advanced Search (filter results by Jurisdiction).
• Westlaw: Statutes & Court Rules: Advanced Search (filter results by Jurisdiction: State and Content Type: Court Rules).

Even with the advent of the internet, finding digitized or born digital versions of state jury instructions outside of a legal database is surprisingly challenging. Some jury instructions still only exist in print as looseleaf publications, a type of primary and secondary reporter that is updated with  sheets of pages in a binder. Print looseleaf reporters are not typically carried by academic law libraries outside of the state. Some states have only a single law library serving its whole state and may offer limited to no options for a remote researcher to access content out of a looseleaf reporter. Finding superseded jury instructions will be even more challenging and would require assistance from the state's law library or appellate court library.

• Jan Bissett & Margi Heinen, Accurately Instructed in the Law: Finding State Jury Instructions, Mich. Bar J., Nov. 2015, at 48. This includes a chart of the online availability of each state's jury instructions.
• Check for a jury instructions research guide offered by a law library in that state.
• Contact the state bar association, a state law library or state court library.