The National Reporter System, by West

the West’s National Reporter System is a group of regional Court Reports or “reporters”
that divides the 50 states and the District of Columbia into seven
national regions: Atlantic, North Eastern, North Western, Pacific,
South Eastern, South Western, and Southern.

These regional Court Reports systems, together with West’s federal court reporters, comprise a national (United States) reporter system tied with the key numbers and the Wesyt’s digest system.

The National Reporter System covers the opinions of state courts of last resort and intermediate appellate courts (in states that have such courts). Federal reporters published by West are also
part of the National Reporter System.

Most of the Individual states reporters published by West, unlike the California Reporter and New York Supplement, simply reprint a state’s cases from its regional Court reporter .

West’s introduce several “enhancements”in order to facilitate the identification of relevant cases from any jurisdiction. Enhancements in the National Reporter System include:

Attorney -editors at West write a synopsis, or brief description, of each case published by
West. Most synopses contain the following information:
• the facts of the case
• the name and holding of the lower court judge
• the holding of the court
• the name of the judge writing the opinion

Court decisions typically contain at least one legal issue. West identifies the legal issues in
cases and discuss each issue in a headnote. Each headnote is usually one sentence and appears between the synopsis and the opinion.

Immediately following the headnote number is the broad legal topic under which West has classified that particular headnote. Topics are the main headnote classification. A key number, representing a specific aspect or subsection of a topic, follows the topic.

Headnotes from cases are grouped in books called digests, where they are arranged by topic and key number. Once you find a relevant topic and key number, you can search for the topic and key number on Westlaw. Headnotes from different cases that discuss the same point of law appear together in a digest, and the same headnote may appear in two or more places in the digest.
The advantage of using the digests is that the key number assigned to a point of law is uniform throughout all of West’s digests.

Main Source: West

• Bluebook
• ALWD Citation Manual
• U.S. States Court Reports
• Court reporter
• List of U.S. Federal Court Reports
• U.S. Digests
• Court Reports
• Legal opinions

Author: international

Mentioned in these Entries

Attorney, Boolean and Free-text Searching for Legal Research, Court Reports, Court reporter, Key Number System, KeySearch, Legal opinions, List of U.S. Federal Court Reports, Selective Publication of Cases, U.S. Digests, U.S. States Court Reports.