Getting the Latest Case Citations – Supreme Court and Tax Court T.C. Opinions (4/29/24)

In today’s Professor Steve Vladek substack offering, commenting on some Supreme Court Justices’ quixotic quest to write a rule for the ages (here), Vladek offered down-page this additional discussion:  SCOTUS Trivia: Earlier Access to Official Citations (One First 4/29/24):

I tweeted about this when it first appeared last year, but the Court’s new “Reporter of Decisions,” Rebecca Womeldorf, has already implemented one significant reform that will be of interest to anyone who prefers citing as many Supreme Court decisions as possible to their official source (the U.S. Reports).

In the old days, it would take 3-4 years from when a Supreme Court decision would come down to when the Court would release the “preliminary part” for the corresponding volume of the U.S. Reports. Thus, any citation to recent Supreme Court decisions was necessarily forced to rely upon unofficial sources—West’s Supreme Court Reporter; Lexis’s Lawyers’ Edition; or others. This didn’t usually matter all that much; those reporters tend to be pretty darn accurate. But there’s a reason why official sources are preferred.

Well, the Supreme Court’s website is now providing official citations to decisions of the Court within weeks of those decisions coming down (and, it appears, is also working backwards to provide citations to rulings from the last few terms, as well). So as opposed to a lag of 3-4 years, now there’s a lag of only 3-4 weeks. A quick glance at the Court’s website shows that there are official citations for every decision through FBI v. Fikre, from March 19 (601 U.S. 234 (2024), for those who are scoring at home).

Again, this may matter to only three of you. But to the three of you who, like me, take special satisfaction from citing recent cases properly, this is good trivia. 

For local page citations, of course, fans have to wait longer. Local page citations can be found in pdf format called Preliminary Prints, here, which as of today are provided from June 14 through June 22, 2018. That is reasonably current, showing about a 10-month delay for full citations and even permalink to the opinion and even to a local page with an appropriate pdf page link.

The Tax Court provides a similar service for its T.C. Opinions on its web page titled United States Tax Court Reports: Pamphlets, here. The latest at the time of this blog entry is:

Volume 160, Number 2
February 1, 2023 to February 28, 2023

3M Company and Subsidiaries
Thomas, Sydney Ann Chaney

I haven’t checked but assume that the local page citations will appear there even before the secondary sources (e.g., Westlaw, LEXIS-NEXIS, and Google Scholar) pick them up. (For techie-types, these pamphlets should be permalinks and permit linking to the precise page with the appropriate pdf page link.)