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TheFederal Supplement (ISSN 1047-7306) is acase lawreporter published byWest Publishing in theUnited States that includes selectopinions of theUnited States district courts since 1932, and is part of theNational Reporter System. Although theFederal Supplement 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 U.S. that legal professionals uniformlycite theFederal Supplement for included decisions.[1] Approximately 40 new volumes are published per year.[1]
Before 1932, federal district court cases were published in theFederal Reporter, which now publishes only case law from theUnited States Courts of Appeals and theUnited States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered opinions of other federal courts as well. TheUnited States Reports are the official law reports of the rulings, orders, case tables, and other proceedings of theSupreme Court of the United States.
TheFederal Supplement 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.
Although opinions designated by the courts as "for publication" or "publish" are included in theFederal Supplement, West editors also select certain opinions without such a designation for publication, as part of West's editorial process. Opinions explicitly designated "not for publication" will not be selected.
Unlike the "published" opinions of theUnited States Courts of Appeals—which are included in theFederal Reporter series and have fullprecedential value, binding the lower courts in the relevant judicial circuit (vertical stare decisis) and, to a lesser degree, the issuing Court of Appeals (horizontal stare decisis)—published district court opinions do not constitute binding precedent. They may, however, be viewed as more persuasive than unpublished opinions.
| Citation:F. Supp. |
| Published: 1933–1998 |
| Volumes: 999 |
Courts covered:
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| Citation:F. Supp. 2d |
| Published: 1998–2014 |
| Volumes: 999 |
| Courts covered: |
| Citation:F. Supp. 3d |
| Published: 2014–present |
| Volumes: 633 (As of August 2023) |
| Courts covered: |
TheFederal Supplement, including its supplementary material, is also available onCD-ROM compilations, and on West's online legal database,Westlaw. Because individual court cases are identified by case 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 originalheadnotes andkeynotes, the opinions themselves arepublic domain and accordingly may be found in other sources, chieflyLexis, Westlaw's competitor. Lexis also copies the star paginatedFederal Supplement numbering in their text of the opinions to allow for proper citation, a practice that was the subject of an unsuccessful copyright lawsuit by West against the parent company of Lexis.[2]
Works related toFederal Supplement at Wikisource
