When professors or attorneys refer to case law, they usually mean the written decisions or opinions of appellate court judges. Researching case law is important to understand a particular legal issue because appellate court opinions are binding on lower courts deciding similar issues. When a court follows the decision of a higher court, or its own precedent, it is called stare decisis. 

There are many ways to find cases, and the method you choose depends on the information that you know about the case.

A case citation is a reference to a where a case is printed in a book. A case citation consists of a volume number, an abbreviation of the title of the book, and a page number.

Example:

What is a Reporter?

The set of books where cases are published are called reporters, and each one has a specific abbreviation which is used in citations.

• Abbreviations for titles of federal reporters.
• Abbreviations for titles of state reporters.

What are Parallel Citations?

When the same case is published in different books, you may cite more than one edition of the same case. For example, parallel citations for Brown v. Board of Education include the following:

347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873

In this example, the case you will find at page 483 of volume 347 of United States Reports will be the same as that found on page 686 of volume 74 of the Supreme Court Reporter (published by Westlaw), and the exact same as that found on page 873 of volume 98 of Lawyers’ Edition (published by LexisNexis).

Finding a case by citation using Nexis Uni

For a tutorial on how to search cases in Nexis Uni, see How do I find cases in Nexis Uni using the Search Box on Nexis Uni?

On Nexis Uni^® there are multiple ways to find cases. You can search for cases by name, citation, court, judge name, or attorney name. The most common way to find cases are by party name and by citation.

1. First, go to Nexis Uni (subscription database).
2. Select "Legal" from the top menu bar.
3. Select "Cases" from the sidebar menu.
4. Only enter the volume number, reporter abbreviation, and page number; do not include the case name. It is important to enter the citation information exactly as listed on the case, or Nexis Uni will not retrieve the correct case.

The text of the case opinion in Lexis Nexis format includes the following information:

• Official and parallel citations to the case
• Date the case was argued and date it was decided
• Case name
• Prior and subsequent history of the case
• Disposition—that is, the court's final decision 

Other information found in the case can include the following:

• Case Summary: Briefly describes the procedural posture, overview and outcome of the case. This is editorial commentary provided by LexisNexis and is not part of the official court decision.

Procedural Posture: this describes the case’s procedural history, or how the case arrived before the court.

Overview: provides a brief review of the underlying facts, legal issues, and the court’s holding.

Outcome: contains the ultimate procedural disposition of the issues in the case—in other words, a succinct summary of the court’s decision in the case. 

• LexisNexis Headnotes

For each case, a LexisNexis editor reads and summarizes each legal issue into a headnote. Headnotes are useful for searching for additional cases containing similar terms and dealing with similar issues. 

Nexis Uni will also Shepardize the presented case by its headnotes. (See Shepard's or Shepardize below for more information.)

To search cases pertaining to a specific subject or topic, use a keyword search to identify cases containing certain key words or phrases. 

1. Go to Nexis Uni (subscription database).
2. Select "Legal" from the top menu bar, then select "Cases" from the content types.
3. Enter your keywords in the search box, or use the "Terms" fields in the search form to make your search more precise. Using the Boolean terms and connectors listed on this page can also help make your search more precise. Select the Search button.
4. If you need to narrow down your results, use the "Search within Results" field to either include more words and phrases to to exclude words or phrases that are likely to be in results irrelevant to your search. You can also refine your results by narrowing them down to categories such as creating a timeline, searching by an attorney's name, or identifying cases in specific practice areas.

Locating a case by party name (such as Brown v. Board of Education) is much more difficult and not generally recommended because the search results often include many cases which are not correct, requiring the user to sift through many results to find the correct case. If you only have the party names of the case, your best bet will be to contact the Sycamore Library for assistance.

Should you choose to search for a case by party name, follow the same steps as you did for the keyword/topic search:

1. First, go to Nexis Uni (subscription database).
2. Select "Legal" from the top menu bar.
3. Select "Cases" from the sidebar menu.
4. Enter the party names, separated by v. (e.g., Brown v. Board) into the search box, then click on the Search button. Alternatively, you can enter the party names into the Party Name field on the search form.

Persons new to legal research will likely, at some point, hear or encounter references to "Shepard's" or to the term "Shepardize." Here is a definition of Shepardize from USLegal.com:

Shepardize Law and Legal Definition

Shepardize is a legal research method of locating reports of appeals decisions based on prior precedents from Shepard's Citations, books which list the volume and page number of published reports of every appeals court decision which cites a previously decided case or a statute. Shepard's volumes are organized by:

* State and Regional citators 
* Federal citators 
* Specialized practice area citators 
* Other citator products including Shepard’s Acts and Cases by Popular Names

These volumes are updated every month with supplemental booklets. Shepard's Citations are used to find appeals decisions which either follow, distinguish or deviate from prior case law. Shepard's Citations are also available for online legal research.

Here are a few Shepard resources available at the Sycamore Library:

Shepard's acts and cases by popular names, federal and state

How to use Shepard's citations; a detailed presentation of the scope and functions of Shepard's citation books, with illustrative examples and an analysis of their relation to other methods of legal research

Shepard's federal statute citations

Nexis Uni provides a Shepardize tool for statutes, regulations and cases. Here are the steps to Shepardize a case in Nexis Uni:

1. Go to Nexis Uni (subscription database).
2. Search for and open the document by entering the citation in the Search box. (Alternatively, you can type shep: followed by the document you wish to Shepardize. For example, shep: Marbury v. Madison
3. In the right margin, you will see a box labeled Shepard's®. Select "Shepardize® this document" to see all the appellate opinions that were issued after this document and cite it in some way. Each opinion will be tagged with a "Shepard's signal" icon to indicate whether the treatment in the citing opinion was positive, negative, or something in between. A stop sign indicates the case was overturned. A green light indicates that the document is still good law. Other icons might indicate that an earlier case is questioned, but not overturned, or that a case is being cited in a neutral way without commenting on the validity of the earlier case.