Vol. 5 No. 5 (May, 1995) pp.146

Comment of Segal’s review of UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT REPORTS (CD-ROM) by Jonathan L. Entin (School of Law, Case Western Reserve University)

This note is occasioned by a couple of comments in Jeffrey Segal’s review of the LOIS CD-ROM version of the Supreme Court reports. Professor Segal compares the CD-ROM version with both Lexis and Westlaw, suggesting that neither of these commercial services contains separate fields within cases. This suggestion is inaccurate. Both services do have separate fields, although the fields are not exactly the same in Lexis and Westlaw. In fact, Lexis calls the fields "segments" rather than fields. Moreover, some of the examples that Professor Segal provides in his comparison of the CD-ROM materials and Lexis are a bit misleading because his search terms in Lexis are not optimal.

Lexis provides segments for case name (called NAME), date, court, lawyers (called COUNSEL), the majority opinion (OPINION), concurring opinions (CONCUR), and dissenting opinion (DISSENT). To find all cases in which Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion, therefore, the best search strategy would be to enter "opinionby(Thomas)" rather than "majority opinion w/10 Thomas" -- which seems to be what Professor Segal was suggesting. This better alternative should not provide the kind of false positives to which Professor Segal referred: cases in which Thomas’s name would appear in proximity to the term "majority opinion." By the same token, one could find the cases in which the Solicitor General filed an amicus brief by searching in Lexis just within the "counsel" segment; Professor Segal suggests that it is not possible, or perhaps not feasible, to separate out the list of counsel from the body of the opinion in Lexis, but that is incorrect. Indeed, I have used Lexis to compile a very extensive database of cases in which amicus briefs have been submitted.

Westlaw’s fields are a bit different, but they have them for case name (called TITLE), court, date, etc. One disadvantage of Westlaw for the examples Professor Segal discusses is that Westlaw includes only the names of lawyers who actually argue in the Supreme Court rather than the list of lawyers who submit or sign briefs (this reflects the format of West’s Supreme Court Reporter).
I don’t want to belabor the point. For those who do not have free access to Lexis or Westlaw, the CD-ROM version of Supreme Court decisions sounds like a valuable product. I have no interest in promoting business for either Lexis or Westlaw. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. My only point is that Professor Segal may not fully appreciate what can be done with those systems, and that misapprehension might be shared by other researchers.

Professor Segal replies: I ran my review past someone who uses Lexis, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. My apologies for any misleading information.