Federal Supplement
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TheFederal Supplement(ISSN1047-7306) is acase lawreporterpublished byWest Publishingin theUnited Statesthat includes selectopinionsof theUnited States district courtssince 1932, and is part of theNational Reporter System.Although theFederal Supplementis an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the U.S. that legal professionals uniformlycitetheFederal Supplementfor included decisions.[1]Approximately 40 new volumes are published per year.[1]
Distinctions
[edit]Before 1932, federal district court cases were published in theFederal Reporter,which now publishes only case law from theUnited States Courts of Appealsand theUnited States Court of Federal Claims;prior series had varying scopes that covered opinions of other federal courts as well. TheUnited States Reportsare the official law reports of the rulings, orders, case tables, and other proceedings of theSupreme Court of the United States.
Features and print format
[edit]TheFederal Supplementorganizes court opinions within each volume by the date of the decision, and includes the full official text of the court's opinion. West editors add headnotes that summarize key principles of law in the cases, and Key Numbers that classify the decisions by topic within theWest American Digest System.
Although opinions designated by the courts as "for publication" or "publish" are included in theFederal Supplement,West editors also select certain opinions without such a designation for publication, as part of West's editorial process. Opinions explicitly designated "not for publication" will not be selected.
Stare Decisis and Precedent
[edit]Unlike the "published" opinions of theUnited States Courts of Appeals—which are included in theFederal Reporterseries and have fullprecedentialvalue, binding the lower courts in the relevant judicial circuit (vertical stare decisis) and, to a lesser degree, the issuing Court of Appeals (horizontal stare decisis)—published district court opinions do not constitute binding precedent. They may, however, be viewed as more persuasive than unpublished opinions.
Series
[edit]Federal Supplement
[edit]| Citation:F. Supp. |
| Published: 1933–1998 |
| Volumes: 999 |
Courts covered:
|
Federal Supplement, Second Series
[edit]| Citation:F. Supp. 2d |
| Published: 1998–2014 |
| Volumes: 999 |
| Courts covered: |
Federal Supplement, Third Series
[edit]| Citation:F. Supp. 3d |
| Published: 2014–present |
| Volumes: 633 (As of August 2023) |
| Courts covered: |
Electronic sources
[edit]TheFederal Supplement,including its supplementary material, is also available onCD-ROMcompilations, and on West's online legal database,Westlaw.Because individual court cases are identified by case citations that consist of printed page and volume numbers, the electronic text of the opinions incorporates the page numbers of the printed volumes with "star pagination" formatting—the numbers are boldfaced within brackets and with asterisks prepended (i.e.,[*4]) to stand out from the rest of the text.
Though West hascopyrightover its originalheadnotesandkeynotes,the opinions themselves arepublic domainand accordingly may be found in other sources, chieflyLexis,Westlaw's competitor. Lexis also copies the star paginatedFederal Supplementnumbering in their text of the opinions to allow for proper citation, a practice that was the subject of an unsuccessful copyright lawsuit by West against the parent company of Lexis.[2]
Notes
[edit]- ^abOlson, Kent C. (1999).Legal Information How to Find It, How to Use it.Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press. p. 185.ISBN9780897749633.
- ^SeeMatthew Bender & Co. v. West Publ. Co.,158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir.1999).
External links
[edit]
Works related toFederal Supplementat Wikisource- Official West Publishing site for theFederal Supplement, 2d
