When a court opinion is designated for publication within a reporter series, it can take months, or in some state publication cases, even years until the hardbound publication is shipped to law libraries. (For one thing, the publisher waits until several volumes of a reporter are ready to be shipped to save costs.)

In the time between the publication of the opinion and the arrival of the hardbound publication, softbound advance sheets are sent out so those cases are accessible to researchers.

WHERE ARE THEY FOUND

Advance sheets are typically collected at the end of whichever Reporter series they belong to.

WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?

Once a researcher opens the advance sheet it will look quite familiar. It looks exactly like the cases in the main volumes. Even the page numbers have been set in stone for the eventual hardbound publication. Thus, the researcher can cite the advance sheet volume and page just as though it was already in a hardbound volume.

MORE . . .

The need for advance sheets has diminished greatly thanks to online research sites such as Westlaw and Lexis. Once an opinion has been set for publication, that opinion can be published online in a matter of days (instead of the weeks, months or more that the physical advance sheets take to arrive at a law library).

One peculiarity that you may witness is when an opinion has been marked for publication, assigned a set of volume and page numbers, published in and advance sheet, but then is "Withdrawn from publication," for one reason or another (such as a court reconsidering its own opinion).

In that case, an odd situation presents itself. How does the hardbound book account for the pages that were saved in order to publish the opinion which has now been "unpublished"?

Strangely, the answer is that those pages on which the opinion was set to appear are still contained in the hardbound Reporter, but they are completely blank! These opinions are usually just a few pages long, but sometimes even 20 or 30 pages of blank pages will present themselves in the book.

Your initial instinct will be to assume there was a printing error. But the reason those blank pages are there is that the page-number integrity of the cases that follow needs to be kept in tact.