LII authoring aid: Supreme Court choice-of-viewing
Why?
There are now numerous sources for Supreme Court opinions on the Internet.
Each has its own peculiarities of formatting and presentation and has different
search capabilities, finding aids, methods of topical organization, and
so on. The free sources of opinions are not comprehensive; each offers
a different range of cases. In short, the would-be reader of a Supreme
Court decision is faced first with finding out which collections have the
particular opinion she is interested in, and then choosing among them.
The author of a document which links to a Supreme Court opinion
must either enforce her own preferences in constructing such a link, or
present a bewildering variety of links in the document itself, or construct
a little "choice list" as a separate document for each such link.
This is needlessly cumbersome, and we've built something which will help
in situations where the case already has a US Reports citation. (Yes, we're
aware that cases which are less than about eighteen months old don't have
US Reports cites, but we had to start somewhere).
How?
To the base URL:
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct-cgi/get-us-cite?
add the volume and page number, eg.
for 487 US 654. This will direct the reader to a page which offers
a selection of locations where the opinion can be found. The reader
also has the option of preselecting preferences, so that in the future
they will be taken directly to their preferred collections, in order of
preference, if those collections have the opinion available.
Related information:
The LII Building blocks page
The LII Supreme Court collections