Supreme Court opinions

Following are descriptions of various search criteria and how information should be entered into them.

Docket number

This is the Supreme Court or Court of Appeals case number. The docket format contains the year, followed by the letters AP (appeals) and the case number. An example docket number would be 1999AP001234. When using the search, if Javascript is enabled on your machine, the system will fill in the first two digits of the year and any leading zeros in the case number. For example, you can retrieve the example opinion noted above by typing 99AP1234.

Date range

Choose Today to search for opinions released today. Choose This week to find all opinions released this week (Monday through Friday). Choose Last week to find all opinions released last week. This month will find all opinions release so far this month, and Last month will find all opinions released during the previous month.

Release date

This is the date that the document was made public. All dates must be in mm-dd-yyyy format (example: 01-10-1994). There are two parts to every date search; a begin date and end date. If you enter a date in the begin date field only, documents released on that day will be listed. If you enter both a begin date and end date, all documents released during that period will be listed.

Final publication date

This is the date the document was made final for publication, which will be printed in the official reports. All dates must be in mm-dd-yyyy format (example: 01-10-1994). There are two parts to every date search; a begin date and end date. If you enter a date in the begin date field only, final publication documents for that day will be listed. If you enter both a begin date and end date, all final publication documents during that period will be listed.

Party name

To search for opinions by party name, enter at least four characters of the party's last name (or company name) into this field. If you aren't sure of the exact spelling you can enter a partial name. For example, if you wanted to search for party Jacobsen, but you weren't sure if the name was spelled Jacobsen or Jacobson, you could enter jacobs into the party name field. This will result in a list that displays all opinions with party names of Jacobson, Jacobsen, Jacobs and McJacobs, along with all other variations of names containing the character sequence jacobs.

Disposition

Some search forms allow you to search by case disposition. You simply choose a disposition type from the supplied list. The resulting list will contain only documents for cases that were disposed by the supplied method. Leave the selection at "not selected" to include all case dispositions in the resulting list.

Court of Appeals district

To search for documents released by a specific Court of Appeals district, select from the available choices (districts 1 through 4).