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Military Review (N.M.C.M.R.). The case decisions
handed down by these courts can be found in official
and unofficial publications called reporters. The
reporters that you will most likely come in contact with
are the U.S. Supreme Court Reporter, the Military Jus-
tice Reporter, the Courts-Martial Reports, the Federal
Reporter, and the Federal Supplement. (NOTE: The
last bound volume of Courts-Martial Reports (C.M.R.)
was volume 50, published in 1975. The Military Justice
Reporter (M.J.), Which began publication in 1978, picks
up where the C.M.R. leaves off. Those cases reported
in advance sheets published between 50 C.M.R. and 1
M.J. are included in 1 M.J.) Additionally, you may have
in your library a state and/or regional reporter (from
West’s National Reporter System) covering the deci-
sions of state and local courts for your command’s
location. Not all states have individual reporters avail-
able. Many states use the National Reporter System
developed by West Publishing Company. The size of
your office, as well as the type of services provided by
that office, will have a large hearing on determining
what type of reporters will be maintained in the library.
Finding Tools
As you can see from the previous discussions con-
cerning primary sources, there are many different
sources that cover a vast number of laws, regulations,
and court decisions. To help the reseacher, several
different types of materials have been developed to aid
in finding the information contained in the primary
sources. The three basic types of finding tools are
digests, legal encyclopedias, and citators.
l Digests—-To impose some sort of order for the
more than 3 million reported case decisions related to
federal and state laws, digests were developed to class-
ify these cases according to their legal topics and then
arrange these topics in alphabetical order. These digests
provide the reseacher with citations to specific uses
and a very brief, often one-sentence digest of each point
of law addressed in each case. The digest (called a
headnote when appearing at the head of the case in the
reporter) is provided to help the researcher decide which
of the cases cited might prove helpful to the researcher
if the entire opinion of a particular case were to be
examined.
Probably the most comprehensive of these digests
is the American Digest System published by West Pub-
lishing Company. This digest system was developed for
use in conjuration with West’s National Reporter Sys-
tem. Three of the other digests published by West are
the Federal Digest, the Modern Federal Practice
Digest, and the Federal Practice Digest 2d. The Fed-
eral Digest is used for finding federal case law from
1754 to 1939, the Modern Federal Practice Digest from
1940 to 1960, and the Federal Practice Digest 2d from
1961 to date. All three sets are needed to complete
federal case law coverage although upkeep and ac-
counting to JAG is required only to the latest. These
three digests are common to all the NLSO law libraries
you will encounter. They use a system where general
topics are subdivided into smaller subtopics identified
by key numbers that can be used for easy reference. The
key numbering system was developed by West Publish-
ing Company to help the researcher quickly find appli-
cable laws. The topics and subtopics are set out
alphabetically in these digests and identified with key
numbers to give the researcher cross-reference to cases
involving similar subject matter. Detailed instructions
on how to use this key number system can be found in
each of the digests and in Price and Bitner’s Effective
Legal Research, which is published by Little, Brown,
and Company.
l Encyclopedias—A second source for finding
cases is through the use of a legal encyclopedia. Even
though these encyclopedias state the law, they are of
dubious value in that they tend to overgeneralize. The
researcher may, however, find in the footnote citations
in encyclopedias a source of cases that can be used to
branch out through the use of digests or a citator. The
national legal encyclopedias are American Jurispru-
dence 2d and Corpus Juris Secundum, published by the
Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company and West
Publishing Company, respectively.
. Citators—Still another type of finding tool that
can be used, more for determining the history or status
of a case than as an initial source for finding the case,
is the citator. The most common of these is Shepard’s
Citations. This particular citator is the most comprehen-
sive and widely used citator available in that it allows
the researcher to accomplish the following actions:
. To trace the judicial history of each reported
case, including proceedings following the cited deci-
sion
. To verify the current status of each reported case
so as to determine whether it is still effective law, or has
been modified or overruled
. To find later cases that have cited the main case
. To find citations in periodical articles and attor-
ney general’s opinions
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