Opinion 710: Fill & Download for Free

I’m taking this as a very basic question that starts with no knowledge of the subject, and I’m going to give a very basic answer that will get you immediate results. I’m going to omit a lot of information in order to keep it simple, and I’m going to stick to decisions of the US Supreme Court. Steven Haddock’s answer provides more information you might find useful.Most opinions in US judicial courts at the federal level can be readily found online; you can do it in seconds by highlighting the text that identifies the case and searching for it. You can stop reading right here if you want to. It really can be that simple.As Steven Haddock indicates, several different entities publish federal cases. I think you will probably find it easiest at first to just stick with the US Reports citations: a number followed by “U.S.” followed by another number, and then probably a year in parentheses. The US Reports, or United States Reports, is the official record of the Supreme Court’s proceedings. Again, you can stop right there if you want to.An example, using a historic case— you might see this citation somewhere and be as intrigued by it as I was when I first read the case:“While our Alien and Sedition Laws were in force, John Adams, President of the United States, en route from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Quincy, Massachusetts, stopped in Newark, New Jersey, where he was greeted by a crowd and by a committee that saluted him by firing a cannon.A bystander said, "There goes the President and they are firing at his ass." Luther Baldwin was indicted for replying that he did not care "if they fired through his ass." He was convicted in the federal court for speaking "sedicious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States" and fined, assessed court costs and expenses, and committed to jail until the fine and fees were paid,”Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705, 710 (1969).Just highlight that “Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705, 710 (1969)” and you can get the search results for that case; for example,Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705 (1969)at justia.com. At that particular site, the first thing I want to point out to you is that right under the header, you will see where you can select Syllabus or Case. The syllabus is a digest of the case, stating the question and a condensation of the court’s ruling. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. For the actual opinions— the opinion of the court, and the concurring and dissenting opinions of individual justices— click on “Case.”You’ll see the text is broken up by page numbers. The “705” in the case identifier is the first page of the case; the “710” in my citation is the page at which the cited text appears. Go down to that page, and you’ll find the cited passage, in Justice Douglas’s concurring opinion. The “394” is the volume of US Reports which contains the opinion. It’s a real book: volume 394 of a series, and that’s the text from a real page in it. You can read a lot of older cases right out of the books. For example, you can read United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) at justia.com; you can also read it right out of the book, published in 1898:United States ReportsMore recent cases won’t have a complete US Reports citation, lacking a page number. Take for example what I like to call The Case From Hell, Sessions v. Morales-Santana, which appears asSessions v. Morales-Santana, 582 U.S. ___ (2017).Becoming more familiar with the material available from the US Reports will help you learn how to access other sources for Supreme Court cases and for district and circuit court cases, too.