WHAT’S COVERED?
SUMMARIES OF DECISIONS RELEASED THE WEEK BEFORE HAVE BEEN POSTED WITHOUT INTERRUPTION SINCE JANUARY 2013
Since January 2013 I have been sifting through the decisions released every week by our appellate courts (all four Appellate Division departments and the Court of Appeals). Keeping up is a challenge because of the sheer number of decisions released weekly all year long, often 200 in a single week. I select the most useful, summarize them, and organize them by legal category.
OVER 10,0000 DECISION-SUMMARIES—A RICH AND COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH TOOL
There are more than 10,000 decision-summaries, encompassing all the legal categories addressed by the courts, in the database.
It is now rare for an issue to come up which has not come up (and been summarized) before. Although the database is populated only by recent decisions (2013 to the present), it is rich and comprehensive enough to be useful for research.
AVOID MISTAKES MADE BY OTHERS—THE DATABASE FOCUSES ON REVERSALS
Because most of the decisions chosen for summary are reversals, the database is filled with substantive discussions of mistakes made by lawyers and judges. A careful, up-to-date, focused search of the database before drafting pleadings, motions, memos or appellate briefs may well ensure the mistakes made by others will not be made by you.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT CATEGORIES AND KEYWORDS FOR NARROW ISSUE SEARCHES IS THE KEY TO UNLOCKING THE INFORMATION IN THE 10,000 POST DATABASE
THE PAGES LINKED TO BELOW PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF MANY OF THE ISSUES AND TOPICS ADDRESSED IN THE DATABASE. A QUICK REVIEW OF A RELEVANT PAGE MAY HELP IN FINDING PRODUCTIVE SEARCH CATEGORIES AND KEYWORDS
For the basics of using the search panel for your research, see the discussions entitled “Just Released” and “Streamlined Research.”
All of the legal categories addressed by the decision-summaries in the database are listed in the drop-down menu in the search panel on the right side of the page. (Click on the top “All Categories” line to reveal the menu.)
In addition, all of the legal categories covered in the database are listed in the footer on each page of the website.
The pages linked to below are offered to provide some idea of the depth of coverage in the database of specific areas of the law and may therefore help in choosing the best categories and keywords for a narrow issue search.