Vol. 6, No. 3 (March,1996) pp. 48-50

UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT REPORTS ON CD-ROM. Portland, Oregon: HoweData (1-800-230-7080). $695.00

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Segal (SUNY at Stony Brook)

"Now you can get every record ever recorded!" So began Robert Klein's classic 1970s spoof on late-night television ads. Well, you still can't get every record ever recorded, but now you can get every Supreme Court decision ever recorded on a single CD-ROM for what might strike many Court watchers as a high but fair price.

Through the magic of data compression, HoweData provides a single CD-ROM that contains all 300,000 Supreme Court decisions, including summary dispositions, writs, memoranda, etc. (The company's statement that it provides "every decision from 1754 on" may confuse some. The United States REPORTS officially contain about 200 state cases, almost exclusively from Pennsylvania, that predate the Constitution.) The CD also includes all tables, charts, maps, and pictures published in the REPORTS. For those who somehow don't think this is enough for a single volume, the CD also contains a wide array of historical documents, including obvious choices (e.g., The Constitution of the United States, The Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers), some pleasant surprises (e.g., The Code of Hammurabi, the Athenian Constitution), and various writings from Thomas Paine, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Nicolo Machiavelli, among others.

The program runs in Windows or DOS, and can be run by Mac users who have SoftPC. I installed the program in Windows just like any other program: File, Run, D:\setup. This process simultaneously configures the program to run in DOS. A separate routine allows for DOS-only installation. I did not try a Mac installation, but the installation worked fine in Windows 95 and Windows 3.1. The only hitch was in Windows 3.1, where a change in my autoexec.bat file that allows automatic viewing of the program's graphics requires a CD (any CD) to be placed in my d: drive when running Windows.

Once in the program, the user can select the entire database, or for faster searching, subsections thereof (e.g., 1950 through 1995). I selected the entire database and ran a query for all cases with the words "MARBURY V. MADISON." Using a 133 MHZ Pentium with 16 Mb of RAM and a 6x CD-ROM, I had a list of 207 cases citing MARBURY, from the 1995 reapportionment case MILLER V. JOHNSON (1995) back through the MARBURY case itself, in less than 10 seconds. The search took only barely longer on a 50 MHZ 486 with 8 Mb of RAM and a 2x CD-ROM accelerated by d-Time software. I achieved slightly faster search results in DOS.

The default presentation for search results is a largely unintelligible DOS filename. Clicking the "Title" icon brings up the familiar case name while clicking on the "Context" icon brings up the lines in each case surrounding the citation to MARBURY. This is a rather useful feature that allows users to quickly see how the original case is used in any given cite without opening up the actual file for that case. Clicking on any case in the search result opens up that case. I clicked on

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MILLER V. JOHNSON and started scrolling through it. At the end of the majority opinion was a camera icon. Clicking the icon opened up a copy of the reapportionment maps the Court included in the REPORTS.

Cases can be opened automatically in your native word processing program for editing or saving by entering the F4 button or clicking the WP icon. The cases come formatted in Word Perfect 5.1 so hard carriage returns exist at the end of paragraphs and only at the end of paragraphs. As virtually every mainstream word processor can read Word Perfect 5.1 files, editing should be a snap. (A proliferation of Constitutional Law textbooks is inevitable. So too, faculty unhappy with any but their own choice of cases can readily roll their own.) The only hitch in this procedure is that the program apparently searches your win.ini file to determine your word processing program. If you have deleted old word processing programs rather than uninstalled them, the program might try to open word processors that no longer exist on your computer. Users can solve this problem by editing their win.ini file, editing HoweData's wisys.ini file, or manually selecting their word processor in HoweData's Preferences menu. HoweData's helpful technical staff (see below) can guide you through the process.

Though the CD-ROM does not come with pre-highlighted cases or cites for hypertext searches, any word, phrase or case can be highlighted for a quick search of the entire database. For example, within SHAW v. RENO one can highlight the text "compelling interest," click on Query, and within 20 seconds have a list of 161 cases that use that phrase. The default listing is reverse chronology, but the cases can be sorted by a number of criteria, including the number of "hits" within each case.

The search engine supports typical Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) as well as proximity search connectors and wildcards. Thus, you can search for all cases in which "solicitor general" appears in the same paragraph, or within x words of, or within y paragraphs of "amicus curiae." Searches can be narrowed by years or citations. Finally, searches can be limited to three different fields: case headers, which contain the parties and the citation; memorandum case headers, which contain the page header for all memorandum decisions; and the authoring justice, which include all opinion authorship paragraphs. Searching possibilities are not always intuitively obvious so an hour or so with the manual (HoweData provides a printed notebook version) will come in handy.

HoweData's data come via license from West. The data are thus as accurate, but no more so, than Westlaw. The company offers annual updates for a mere $50, though you must return your old disk in order to receive the new one. The program will run on a network, but site licenses cost extra.

For Court watchers without free access to Lexis, the question is not whether to buy a CD-ROM of the United States REPORTS, but which one to buy. At the high end, West Publishing and Lawyers' Cooperative Publishing offer their complete CD's for about $3,000. These sets offer the inconvenience of multiple volumes, but do provide West's and Lawyers' case annotations, key words, etc., and hard copies of the advance sheets. It is

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difficult to imagine readers of the Law and Politics Book Review who would find this a premium worth paying. The best of the low end volumes is the $50 CD-ROM from Law Office Information Systems (LOIS) (1-800-364-2512. See Segal 1995 for a review.) The most obvious difference between the two is that HoweData's $695 collection contains all Supreme Court decisions while LOIS currently goes back to 1949, and does not currently contain summary decisions. LOIS, though, is scheduled to backdate to 1899 by May of this year, and states that it hopes to have the complete REPORTS, including summary decisions, ready by the end of the calendar year. Obviously, the usual caveats for software publication dates apply.

There are other differences between the two systems. HoweData contains maps, photos and the like not found in LOIS. On the other hand, I much prefer LOIS's search capabilities. In LOIS, finding all cases in which Scalia dissented requires typing "Scalia" in the "Author of Dissenting Opinion" field. Finding the same information in HoweData requires the following abstruse command: "(scalia/3/djq) and ((scalia and dissenting) in djq)". To be fair, though, HoweData's manual does a good job of explaining common search requests. Nevertheless, the real question comes down to how much extra readers are willing to pay for the completeness of HoweData, weighed against the promise of backdating by LOIS. This will, in the end, be a personal decision based on the immediate research needs and budgets of scholars and practitioners.

HoweData supports DOS, Windows, and Mac operating systems. Mac users will need SoftPC. Listed minimum requirements for DOS include an IBM PC, AT, PS/2 or compatible; MS-DOS version 2.0 or higher; 512k of memory; and 2Mb free hard disk space. Windows users will need version 3.1 or higher and 8 Mb free disk space. HoweData does not list specific requirements for Macs beyond SoftPC. Obviously, the program requires a CD-ROM drive.

HoweData provides technical support via phone and through e-mail. I e-mailed questions over the weekend and received a phone call from a HoweData technical assistant at 9:07 am PST Monday morning. The staffer wasn't able to answer my questions immediately, but got back to me within forty minutes.

Finally, like Robert Klein's late night record offer, HoweData's United States REPORTS comes with a 30 day unconditional money back guarantee. But unlike records, the worst Supreme Court decisions are often as interesting as the best. Having every single one of them on a single compact disk is one of the great advances of the computer revolution.

REFERENCES

MARBURY V. MADISON, 1 Cranch 137 (1803).

MILLER V. JOHNSON, 115 S.Ct. 2475 (1995).

Segal, Jeffrey A. 1995. Review of UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT REPORTS (CD-ROM). LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW, 5:143-45.

SHAW V. RENO, 113 S.Ct. 2816 (1993).