Monday, March 10, 2025

Adventures in Early Legal Citations

If you’re not used to working with legal citations, encountering them for the first time can be a less-than-pleasant experience. This is doubly true when it comes to tracking down older cases. In this blog post, I’ll use one of our past research questions to point out useful resources and hopefully demystify some of the process of tracking down old cases.

A few months ago, my colleagues and I received a request for help with locating cases from the first half of the 19th century. Initially, the patron just gave us the names of the parties and the dates of the cases, e.g., Paul Moody vs. Johnathan Fiske et.al., 1820. Ideally, we would have the title of the reporter, its volume number, and the page number on which the case was printed. We reached out to the patron and asked if they could send us any more info (this reference question was being asked via email, which caused a bit of a time delay).

In the meantime, we started reading through the guide our friends at the Trial Court Libraries compiled: Historical Massachusetts Cases. This source is invaluable when researching old cases (especially ones that occurred pre-statehood). In ye olden times, cases were published in reporters named after whichever judge was the “Reporter of Decisions” at the time. The various titles Allen, Cushing, Grey, Metcalf, and Pickering correspond to the following: Charles Allen (1861-1867); Luther Stearns Cushing (1848-1853); Horace Grey (1854-1860); Theron Metcalf (1840-1847); and Octavius Pickering (1822-1839). Eventually, these got reprinted in Massachusetts Reports (you use this guide to figure out which volumes here); however, older works will sometimes cite to these “nominative” reporters rather than Massachusetts Reports (Mass. Reports). Eventually the patron got back to us with more details: Paul Moody vs. Johnathan Fiske et.al., October 1820, U.S. Circuit Court, Massachusetts District. Plot twist: this isn’t a Massachusetts case – it’s a federal one. Your clue is “U.S. Circuit Court.” You can learn more about the federal court system here. Without getting too deep into the details, the basic points are that within the federal system, each state is its own District, multiple Districts make up a Circuit, and a Circuit shares the same Court of Appeals. Massachusetts, along with Maine, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Rhode Island make up the First Circuit and thus share the First Circuit’s Court of Appeals. The image below shows what states belong to which Circuits:


Map of how the federal courts are split into twelve regional circuits and one Federal Circuit

You can learn more about the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts here. [Side note: the Court for the District of Massachusetts shouldn’t be confused with the District Courts which are part of the Massachusetts Trial Court system. These courts are all over Massachusetts in every judicial district. You can also search district courts (and other trial courts) by county.] Long story short, the patron is trying to find a federal case. Depending on the resources you have available, there’s a relatively simple way of doing this and there’s a more convoluted way, guess which one we chose to use!

Starting with the simpler rout, if you have access to Westlaw, you can enter the beginning of the case title into the search Moody v. Fiske and select the one that has the matching date info. Ta-da!


 If you don’t have access to a proprietary legal database (or if you’re a glutton for punishment), you will need to find out which reporter published this case. Federal cases decided in courts lower than the Supreme Court are published in the Federal Reporter (Supreme Court cases are printed in the US Reports – that’s a whole other thing that I’m not going to get into in this post). Because the Federal Reporter didn’t start publishing cases until 1880, and because our case is from 1820, we need to look at the Digest of Decisions of the United States Circuit and District Courts, from 1789 to 1880, As Contained in the Thirty Volumes of The Federal Cases. Luckily, this is fully digitized on HathiTrust:


Use the text search feature to search “Moody v. Fiske” (in quotes). You’ll get a couple of hits, the one you want is the full citation that tells you where this was originally published.


The scan isn't that great, but it says: MOODY v. FISKE [9,745], 2 Mason, 112; 1 Robb, Pat. Cas. 312. The number in brackets is the case number which you can look up in The Federal Cases (also available on HathiTrust) – number 9,745 is on page 655 in volume 17. This is the print version of what you would find on Westlaw:


If you want to go the extra mile and see what this case looked like before it was reprinted here, go past [9,745] to where the citation reads 2 Mason, 112. This means that the case was originally published in volume 2 of the US Circuit Court Reports when it was overseen by William P. Mason, sometimes called Mason's United State Circuit Court Reports. (Learn more about reporting early Federal Court decisions here.) The formal title you’ll want to search is: Reports of cases argued and determined in the Circuit Court of the United States for the First Circuit : containing the cases determined in the districts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island

Once again, HathiTrust comes through for us and has these volumes online. We’ve established that we need volume 2, so we select that one:


Once we’re in volume 2, we then scroll down to page 112 and find the case:

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