History of Year Books

English-language first case reports, Year Books, were manuscript law reports prepared from 1292 to 1535.[1] These early reports were collections of notes taken down concerning actions at the court,[2] rather than case reports as were developed lately.[3]

(Nomative) court reporters[4] followed The Year Books . These reports were individually compiled by a member of the law society (bar) who would gather notes of the courts’ decisions as recorded by himself, from other lawyers or, perhaps, from the notes of judges.[5] Although recognized as crucial building blocks in the development of law, these reporters were disorganized and often contradictory.[6] Moreover, the quality, reliability, and comprehensiveness varied because the texts were frequently rewritten and subjective; intellectual input was involved in the production of the reporters.[7] Early court reporters, both in England and the United States, were entrepreneurs, transcribing, editing and publishing the cases of one or more courts, and functioning independently of one another.

Edmund Plowden published the earliest nominative reports in England in 1571. Plowden’s reports were characterized by their high degree of accuracy and completeness, a standard that was unfortunately not met by later compilers.[8] From 1571 until the 1640s, only a few volumes of law reports were published; however, in the 1640s and 1650s, a “flood of reports”was issued by a number of publishers, most of them of dubious quality and value. Not until 1756, when Burrow’s Reports appeared, was “there . . . a series approximating in fullness and accuracy the standards of a modern law report.”[9] Burrows and his followers turned law reporting into a specialized field and began a new era in the law.

In the United States, the era of nomative Court Reports began in 1789 with Ephraim Kirby’s Connecticut Reports.[10] In his preface, Kirby expressed the wish that a “‘permanent system of Common law ‘ . . . would emerge in the country .”[11] His wish soon came true. As the legal system in the new republic rapidly expanded, there was an urgent need for access to case reports and a willingness by lawyers to pay for them.[12]

By 1810, nomative reports were being published for the US Supreme Court, as well as for the state courts of Connecticut, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.[13] Yet, by the middle of the 19th century, the number of American case reports was still only a few hundred. The growth of official reports led to the reduction in publication of nomative report features; consequently, the character of the reporting process changed.[14]

Main Source: A UNIFORM INTERNATIONAL SALES LAW TERMINOLOGY. Vikki M. Rogers and Albert H. Kritzer. Reproduced from Ingeborg Schwenzer / Günter Hager ed., Festschrift für Peter Schlechtriem zum 70. Geburtstag, Mohr Siebeck (2003) 223-253.

1. Robert C. Berring, Legal Research and Legal concepts : Where Form Moulds Substance, 75 Calif. L. Rev. 15, 15 (1997), citing F. Hicks, Materials and Methods of Legal Research with Bibliographic Manual 94 (1923) (“The first report to be printed in succession to The Year Books was Les Comentaires, ou les Reports, of Edmund Plowden, first published in 1571. It was, like the Year Books, written in Law French, but English translations of it were published in 1761, 1779, 1792 and 1816″).

2. J.H. Baker, Records, Reports, and the Origins of Case-Law in England, in Judicial Records, Law Reports, and the Growth of Case Law 21 (J.H. Baker, ed., 1989).

3. Id.

4. Nomative reports are “named for the person who recorded or edited them.”Morris L. Cohen et al., How to Find the Law 16 (1989).

5. Id.

6. Id.

7. Id.

8. J.P. Dawson, The Oracles of Law 65 (1968).

9. Berring, supra note 1
10. Berring, supra note 1. During the colonial period, no American case reports were published. See Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law 323, n. 55 (2d ed. 1985) (Friedman points out that some reports were published many years after the cases were decided. For instance, “Joseph Quincy’s Massachusetts Reports (1761-1771) . . . [were] published in 1865.”). Practicing lawyers relied on English case reports or gleaned the law from precious English Legal Treatises . Id. at 323. In part, this was because most judges in the American colonies were not legally trained, and “colonial lawyers considered the Superior Courts of England as the ultimate authority on the Common law . . . .”See Erwin C. Surrency, A History of American Law Publishing 24-25 (1990). Some lawyers prepared manuscript volumes of local cases for their personal use and then shared them with their colleagues in the practicing bar.

11. Friedman, supra note 10.

12. Id.

13. Like the English nomative reports, these early law reports were produced by private entrepreneurs eager to meet the demands of the burgeoning bar; gradually, however, appointed officials supplanted them and the nominative reports began to die out. In some ways, this development was salutary because “[o]fficial reports tended to be fuller and more accurate than unofficial reports, but they were also much more standardized.

14. Id.

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