Federal Reporter

Case law reporting in US courts

The Federal Reporter is a case law reporter in the United States that is published by West Publishing and a part of the National Reporter System. It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre 1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter, Federal Cases. The fourth and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though the Federal Reporter is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformly cite to the Federal Reporter for included decisions. Approximately 30 new volumes are published each year. (established in 1982)
United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (1929–1982)
United States courts of appeals
United States district courts (until 1932)
United States Emergency Court of Appeals (1942–1961)
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List of opinions from the Federal Reporter, Second Series on Wikisource
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The Federal Reporter, including its supplementary material, is also available at websites including OpenJurist. org, on CD ROM compilations, and on West's online legal database, Westlaw. Because individual court cases are identified by case citations that consist of printed page and volume numbers, the electronic text of the opinions incorporates the page numbers of the printed volumes with "star pagination" formatting—the numbers are boldfaced within brackets and with asterisks prepended (i. e., [*4]) to stand out from the rest of the text. Though West has copyright over its original headnotes and keynotes, the opinions themselves are public domain and accordingly may be found in other sources, chiefly Lexis, Westlaw's primary competitor. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has also ruled that Lexis can copy the page numbers from the Federal Reporter to allow for proper citation without violating West's copyright.