1. Accessing the LexisNexis Academic Database

2. Selecting the Legal Section

3. Selecting the Federal & State Cases section

4. Viewing Your Results List

5. Viewing the Full Text of Court Cases

6. How to Shepardize a Court Case

Finding Federal and State Court Cases Using the LexisNexis Academic Database

Accessing the LexisNexis Academic Database

• From the Library home page, select Database & Article Search
• From the Browse Databases by Title section, select letter “L” and click on LexisNexis

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Selecting the Legal Section

In addition to legal topics, the LexisNexis database is a source for business, news, and biographical information, so you will need to click on Legal in the band of choices in the LexisNexis home page.

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Selecting the Federal & State Cases section

From the Legal Searches selections on the left hand side of the screen, click Federal & State Cases.

These cases include U.S. Supreme Court cases and briefs, U.S. Courts of Appeals, U.S. District Courts, and state Supreme Court cases. For more information on the federal court system, see About U.S. Federal Courts.

From the pull down menu for Select Sources, make your selection according to which court system you wish to search. If you are not sure, or do not want to limit your search to a specific court system, leave the default choice in place (Federal and State Cases, Combined).

Once you have selected the Source from which your court case is to be searched, decide how you wish to search your case. LexisNexis lets you search and apply limits many ways:

• Case Name: This is the choice most often chosen. An example of a famous case name is Roe v. Wade, in which a pregnant single woman (Jane Roe, the plaintiff) brought a class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws against (“v.” or “vs.” for “versus,” meaning against) Wade, district attorney for Dallas County.


• Citation Number: This search can be more complicated, as you must make certain you have the exact citation number in proper format and enter it in the Lexis search field correctly. An example of a court citation number, using the court case above, is 410 U.S. 113 (1973). This is a U.S. Supreme Court case citation number. There are many systems of legal citations for the various federal and state courts. For assistance in using citation numbers, click the Citation Help link to the right of the citation number search box. You may also consult How To Read a Legal Citation.


• Judge’s Last Name: Use this search to find court cases presided over by a particular judge, or in the case of the U.S. Supreme Court, names of any of the nine Justices hearing a Supreme Court case. For example, you can search the court cases of retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by entering her last name, O’Connor, in the Judge’s Last Name search box.


• Counsel or Firm Name: “Counsel” is a lawyer who pleads cases in court, and “firm” is a partnership of several lawyers who operate a law office. For example, the name of lawyer Gregory G. Garre (counsel) retrieves over 40 cases in the LexisNexis database. The firm name of White, Getgey & Meyer retrieves over 100 cases.


• Specify Date: The default is All Available Dates. If you know the date of your court case, or wish to limit court cases to specific time periods, change this limiting feature to the desired date.





• Topic or Keywords: Use the Enter Search Terms box. The LexisNexis legal search strategies for keywords and topics can become quite complicated, as you will see when clicking on the View Connectors link below the search box. This help screen explains the various ways searches can be constructed. To start, it is suggested that you simply enter words or phrases as you may do in the Google.com search engine. View the search instructions if your search does not retrieve the desired results. For example, a search for federal and state court cases involving copyright issues of photographs and model releases retrieves about 20 cases. The search would be entered this way: copyright and photographs and model release.

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Viewing Your Results List

Using again the example above for finding court cases on the topic of copyright and photographs and model release, one can see from the partial results below that little useful information appears:

You can view your keywords and phrases in context with the complete text of the court case by using the Expanded List feature, found in the pull down menu for Show in the upper left corner of the results list. This will show where your key search terms occur in the court document, as well as how often your key search terms appear.

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Viewing the Full Text of Court Cases

To view the full text of a single court case in your results list, simply click on the blue court case name. To view all at once the full text for all the court cases retrieved, use the Show pull down menu in the upper left of the results list and select Full Document.

In addition to the full text of the case reproduced from original official court documents, the Headnotes show the key legal points of a case. Each Headnote is written by a LexisNexis legal editor, drawing directly from the language of the court, and appear as short paragraphs, each with the initials HN and a number. Samples appear below:

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How To Shepardize a Court Case

The LexisNexis legal database has a Shepardizing function. Originally, Shepardizing a court case was done with the use of Shepard’s Citations, a paper-based, tedious, and time-consuming legal tool to ascertain precedents, reversals, overrulings, concurring opinions, dissenting opinions, appeals, and judicial history of a court case. The paper-based method is now mostly used in law libraries and law schools.

To Shepardize a court case in the LexisNexis database, first open up the full text of a court case by clicking on the blue case name. Then use the Next Steps pull down menu in the upper right corner, selecting Shepardize® and clicking on the Go button.

You will be taken to a Shepard’s Summary page. When you are finished reading the Shepard’s information, click on the Document link at the top of the screen to return to the full text of your court case.

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