Constitutional Law: Political Science 220

Supreme Court Information

LexisNexis Academic: U.S. Supreme Court research
Provides full text of Supreme Court decisions since 1790, and dispositions of all cases appealed to the Supreme Court. Also provides access to decisions from Circuit Courts, District Courts, and state courts.

Finding text of Supreme Court decisions, previews, and briefs:

 

• Why use LexisNexis? The text comes from U.S. Supreme Court Cases, Lawyers' Edition and contain headnotes and links to references.
• Click on Legal Research, then Federal Case Law
• Click Guided Search.  Enter your keywords in the boxes; use the drop-downs to specify plaintiff, defendant, justice names, citation, or full text for your search.
• Specify the date range.
• Select the court of interest; the default is Supreme Court Cases
• Click Search.
• Scroll to the bottom of the decision document to find links to “REFERENCES”, including related briefs and transcriptions of oral arguments.

 

Shepardizing a case:

• Why Shepardize? 
  • "Validate, or cite-check, your case to determine whether it is still good law, e.g., whether its value as precedent has been affected by a later court decision or legislative action"
  • "Locate a comprehensive listing of additional cases and other authorities that have cited your case, including annotations and law-review articles" - from LexisNexis Academic, Legal Research
• Click on Legal Research, then Shepard's for U.S. Supreme Court
• Enter the case's citation, select "for validation" or "for reference", and Search.

FindLaw: US Supreme Court Center
Site provides text of all decisions since 1893, as well as related decisions, briefs, court rules, biographical information on justices, and more.  Printable version of decision is nicely formatted, but does not contain Lawyer's Edition headnotes (see LexisNexis version).

LII Supreme Court Collection

Provides access to selected historic Supreme Court decisions, including many from before 1893.

The Oyez Project: Supreme Court Multimedia

This site provides case summaries, full text opinions and argument transcripts, streaming audio of selected oral arguments, and other kinds of information on Supreme Court cases.  Browse cases through 2003 by subject (click Cases in the top menu bar) or search. 

U.S. Supreme Court website: Argument Transcripts

Provides argument transcripts from 2000 to the present.

Law Reviews and Legal News

LexisNexis Academic
Contains full-text law review articles and news articles from legal sources.  Click Legal Research, then Law Reviews or Legal News.  (Tip: When you search Law Reviews, sort your results by relevance.)

Use these resources to locate state-level cases dealing with an issue of interest that may not have made it to the Supreme Court.  Once you identify some cases, go to Legal Research, State Case Law to find the opinions.

 

Other Background Sources

National Constitution Center: Explore the Constitution

Offers an annotated "Interactive Constitution" with indexing and elaborations on many topics such as affirmative action, equal protection, school prayer, and the death penalty.

Douglass: Archives of American Public Address

"Douglass is an electronic archive of American oratory and related documents."  (from home page)  Very useful for finding historical speeches and other primary source documents.

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School : Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy

Contains "primary source materials in the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government." (from home page)  Includes the text of the Federalist Papers.

Historical New York Times
Offers full-page-images and article images from the New York Times from its first issue in 1851 to three years before the current date.

CQ Researcher
Offers full-text reports on current and controversial world issues. Topics include social, environmental, health, education, science and technology issues. Covers 1991-present.

Great American Court Cases (via xreferplus)
Great American Court Cases (1999 ed.) is an online four-volume reference book on significant Supreme Court, federal court, and state court decisions.  Xreferplus provides full-text access to over 170 reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, books of quotations, etc., in various fields including art, law, literature, social sciences, and technology.

 

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