United States Reports citation gaps

[anseljh]

This may belong in Juriscaper instead. Forgive me if this a duplicate issue. Even so, some of this writeup may be helpful.

We crawl Supreme Court slip opinions to get them as soon as they're available. The problem is, they don't come with the official United States Reports citation (U.S.) because it doesn't exist yet. It doesn't exist until the court's Reporter of Decisions and the U. S. Government Publishing Office have given it the sliced-trees treatment. That takes a while. (I don't know how long.)

We need a way to come back and find those citations once they exist, and to then relate them back to the opinion records we created from the slip opinions.

Why this is important

1. When we lack the official U.S. Reports citation, users will struggle to find Supreme Court opinions by the citation they're most likely to input.
2. If a user does find a case, they won't be able to cite it correctly if we can't give them the proper official U.S. citation.
3. One cannot build a citator without impeccable U.S. Reports coverage.

So there are two main tasks:

1. Fill gaps in our existing cases. (Identify SCOTUS cases we have that are lacking U.S. citations. Find and add those citations.)
2. Figure out how to get timely updates and add them on a going-forward basis automatically.

There are at least these resources available to help, and this may not be a complete list:

• SCDB. We already use this to some extent, but I'm not an expert. But it, too, does not get immediate updates. As of today (August 8, 2024) the latest release is from December 24, 2023, and includes up to the 2022 term. So, it won't have anything from the 2023 term (i.e., cases decided through 2024).
• The Supreme Court website has a "Case Citation Finder" at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/casefinder.aspx. You can optionally put a search term in, or just page through all 31,919 (as of now) records in 1,596 pages (20 hits / page). I used this successfully to find U.S. citations we're missing for slip opinions we have in our database.
• The Library of Congress has a large United States Reports collection, with 36,617 items up to 2013. The "About this Collection" page states: "This digital collection of the U.S. Reports contains volumes 1-570, covering the years 1754-2012. This collection will continue to grow as the Supreme Court digitizes more volumes of the U.S. Reports." A unique aspect of the LoC collection is that it includes subject headings for opinions, which could be useful.

Example time: I used CourtListener's Citation Lookup Tool on a few U.S. Reports citations tonight. Here are some the tool failed to find. Searching for the cases by name, we have the slip opinions and even some other parallel citations, which is interesting.

• Carpenter v. United States (2018)
  • We have a slip opinion with three different parallel citations, but no U.S. citation.
  • A search for "carpenter" on the SCOTUS citation finder yields Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296 (2018).
  • Putting that back into our citation lookup tool confirms we don't have the U.S. Reports citation.
  • Here are the parallel citations we do have:
    • 138 S. Ct. 2206
    • 201 L. Ed. 2d 507
    • 2018 U.S. LEXIS 3844
  • We actually provide citation graph visualizations including Carpenter (like this one), but they lack information on how many times it's been cited (presumably because we can't relate those later citations back yet.)
• Oracle v. Google (2021)
  • We have two slip opinions, neither of which have a U.S. Reports citation:
    • April 5, 2021 slip opinion
    • May 3, 2021 updated slip opinion
  • The SCOTUS website's citation finder yields: Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U. S. 1 (2021).
  • The SCOTUS website opinions page for the 2020 term shows 593 U. S. 1, and links to a "Preliminary Print" PDF, which has Cite as: 593 U. S. 1 (2021) in the header on the pages of the opinion.
  • Our citation lookup tool doesn't find it.

Heads up to @flooie and @mlissner.

[flooie]

Thanks @anseljh

cc @grossir

[grossir]

We have observed this issue, and have been drafting a way to solve it, for all courts including scotus.

Do you want me to work on this next @flooie ? Referencing the linked issue (we should change its title), scotus belongs to the class of courts where collection of citations is "easier", in the sense that we can reuse the existing scraper

[rlfordon]

We crawl Supreme Court slip opinions to get them as soon as they're available. The problem is, they don't come with the official United States Reports citation (U.S.) because it doesn't exist yet. It doesn't exist until the court's Reporter of Decisions and the U. S. Government Publishing Office have given it the sliced-trees treatment. That takes a while. (I don't know how long.)

FYI in case it's relevant - it used to take years because they waited until the whole US Reports volume was published in print, but beginning with the 2022 term, they started posting U.S. reports proofs for opinions as soon as they became available. This sometimes takes just a few weeks, but can sometimes take longer. The US reporter proofs will sometimes make corrections to the original slip opinion, and will also have the US Reports pagination. So, we should be sure to replace(? or just add?) the slip opinion with the US Reports proof when it is posted.

From the U.S. Reports page on the Supreme Court's website:

The U. S. Reports volumes available for free download on this website consist of volumes 502 et seq., which covers the 1991 Term and subsequent Terms. Starting with the Court’s 2022 Term, PDFs of the U. S. Reports (in both preliminary print and bound volume format) will be posted to this website as they become available. PDFs of volumes not yet officially published and available for purchase from GPO will be posted bearing a “page proof” watermark.