The United States Supreme Court unofficial and unpaid acts within Kansas v. Hendricks

The United States Reports are the official record (law reports) of the rulings, orders, case tables (list of every case decided, in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner (plaintiff in lower courts) and by the name of the respondent (defendant)), and other proceedings of the Supreme Court of the United States. Opinions of the court in each case, prepended with a headnote prepared by the Reporter of Decisions, and any concurring or dissenting opinions are published sequentially. The Court's Publication Office oversees the binding and publication of the volumes of United States Reports, although the actual printing, binding, and publication are performed by private firms under contract with the United States Government Printing Office.

CitationEdit

For lawyers, citations to United States Reports are the standard reference for Supreme Court decisions. Under thecommonly accepted citation protocol, the case Brown, et al., v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, for example, is cited thus:

Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

This citation indicates that the decision of the Court in the case entitled Brown v. Board of Education (as properly abbreviated), decided in 1954, can be found in volume 347 starting on page 483 of the United States Reports.

HistoryEdit

The early volumes of the United States Reports were originally published privately by the individual Supreme Court Reporters. As was the practice in England, the reports were designated by the names of the reporters who compiled them: Dallas's Reports,Cranch's Reports, etc.

The decisions appearing in the entire first volume and most of the second volume of United States Reports are not decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Instead, they are decisions from various Pennsylvania courts, dating from the colonial period and the first decade after Independence. Alexander Dallas, a lawyer and journalist, ofPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, had been in the business of reporting these cases for newspapers and periodicals. He subsequently began compiling his case reports in a bound volume, which he called Reports of cases ruled and adjudged in the courts of Pennsylvania, before and since the Revolution.[1] This would come to be known as the first volume of Dallas Reports.

When the United States Supreme Court, along with the rest of the new Federal Government moved, in 1791, from New York City to the nation's temporary capital in Philadelphia, Dallas was appointed the Supreme Court's first unofficial, and unpaid.