TheFederal Reporter (ISSN 1048-3888) is acase law reporter in theUnited States that is published byWest Publishing and a part of theNational Reporter System.[1] It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre-1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter,Federal Cases. The fourth and currentFederal Reporter series publishesdecisions of theUnited States courts of appeals and theUnited States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though theFederal Reporter is 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 United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformlycite to theFederal Reporter for included decisions.[2] Approximately 30 new volumes are published each year.[1]
TheFederal Reporter has always published decisions only from federal courts lower than theSupreme Court of the United States, but not the Supreme Court itself. Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court are published in one official reporter and two unofficial reporters, which are, respectively, theUnited States Reports,Supreme Court Reports (a National Reporter System member published by West), and theUnited States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition.
Beginning in 1932, West stopped publishing federal district court cases in theFederal Reporter and began to publish them in a separate reporter, theFederal Supplement.[1]
TheFederal Reporter organizes 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.
Only decisions designated by the courts as "for publication"—those with fullprecedential value for which citation in court filings is permissible—are included in theFederal Reporter. "Unpublished" decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals issued from the years 2001-2021 could be found in theFederal Appendix, also published by West. West ceased publication of theFederal Appendix in 2021. New opinions are first issued by West in weekly pamphlets called "Advance Sheets", to be eventually supplanted by the final hardbound, successively numbered volumes. Three series ofFederal Reporter have been published to date, with the fourth series started in June 2021.
| Citation:F. |
| Published: 1880–1924 |
| Volumes: 300 |
Courts covered:
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| Citation:F.2d |
| Published: 1924–1993 |
| Volumes: 999 |
Courts covered:
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| Opinions |
| Citation:F.3d |
| Published: 1993–2021 |
| Volumes: 999 |
| Courts covered: |
| Opinions |
| Citation:F.4th |
| Published: 2021–present |
| Courts covered: |
TheFederal Reporter, including its supplementary material, is also available at websites includingOpenJurist.org, onCD-ROM compilations, and on West's online legal database,Westlaw. Because individual court cases are identified bycase 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 hascopyright over its original headnotes and keynotes, the opinions themselves arepublic domain and accordingly may be found in other sources, chieflyLexis, Westlaw's primary competitor. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has also ruled that Lexis can copy the page numbers from theFederal Reporter to allow for proper citation without violating West's copyright.[6]