Primary Authority | State Cases
Publications that contain the law

| State cases are found in official Reports and unofficial Reporters. The regional reporters below are a part of the National Reporter System by West Publishing. Thus, they all tend to look alike! ATLANTIC REPORTER NORTH EASTERN REPORTER NORTH WESTERN REPORTER PACIFIC REPORTER SOUTH EASTERN REPORTER SOUTH WESTERN REPORTER SOUTHERN REPORTER Official state reports, like the Colorado Reports, the North Carolina Reports, etc., are published by the government.
| THE INDEX Reports and Reporters do not have indexes. Well, then how can a researcher find relevant cases within the reports and reporters? The answer: digests. Digests act as an index to case law. Thus, the Pacific Digest leads to state cases from the Pacific Region. The Atlantic Digest leads to state cases from the Atlantic Region. Digests are collections of headnotes arranged in topical order. They are primarily published by WestGroup, and thus utilize the Key Number System. Start in the index of the appropriate Digest. The index will provide a topic and Key Number leading to the main volumes of the digest. The digest will contain multiple headnotes. If any are relevant, the researcher would note the citation at the bottom of the headnote, then look up the actual case. Look closely at the digest page above. Notice the topic at the top of the page, and the Key Numbers on the page. (They act like section numbers.) Also notice the headnotes, and the citations at the end of each headnote.
| UNOFFICIAL REPORTERS Many states have official state reports for both state appellate and state supreme courts. An example of an opinion from the California Reports is provided on the left. Notice that there are no Key Numbers, since the book is published by the government. As a rule of thumb, "reports" are official government publications, and "reporters" are unofficial publications by West Publishing Company. Of course, if you were citing a case for a brief, you would Shepardize the opinion to make ensure it's validity.
| OFFICIAL REPORTS There are over a hundred digests by West. There are also a few other digests out there that, although they do not utilize the Key Number System, are accessed in a very similar fashion. For instance, Lawyer's Cooperative publishes the U.S. Supreme Court Digest, Lawyer's Edition, and the A.L.R. Digest, which leads only to cases annotated within American Law Reports.