The law and courts’ effects on them are major topics of debate today, particularly those of the Supreme Court. Knowing when and how the high court reverses its own previous decisions and knowing what then constitutes current law are vital skills for educated citizens.
The Supreme Court has reversed its previous decisions more than 300 times in the country’s 246 year history. Sometimes it has done this very quickly, such as Robbins v. California (453 U.S. 420), which was overruled by the United States v. Ross (456 U.S. 798) within a year, allowing police officers to conduct warrantless searches of opaque containers in cars they had pulled over. Sometimes the law changed is quite old, such as Minturn v. Maynard (58 U.S. 477), which was on the books for 136 years, before Exxon Corp. v. Central Gulf Lines Inc. (500 U.S. 603) unanimously held that there was no exception to admiralty jurisdiction in placing maritime liens.
Alongside the emerging story of Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) being superseded by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (official citation will start with 597 U.S.), two of the best-known overturned Supreme Court cases are Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. 393) and Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537); their decisions are now regarded as racist misapplications of the law. Only one of them, however, is an example of the Supreme Court overturning a previous decision. Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483) replaced Plessy v. Ferguson, integrating schools across racial lines. Scott v. Sandford, on the other hand, was not reversed by the Supreme Court itself, but by constitutional amendment: namely, the 13th and 14th Amendments. Another example of overrule by legislation is Minor v. Happersett (88 U.S. 162), finding that women, although citizens, had no right to vote; which was abolished by the 19th Amendment.
For in-depth law research, or for general scholarly research on legal matters, a major database is Nexis Uni (this was formerly called Lexis Nexis Academic). All of the links to the cases listed above are drawn from this source. The text of many of these can also be found on the free internet (for example, United States v. Ross can be found here), but the free internet versions will not offer any of the powerful scholarly features provided by Nexis Uni. This database includes, in addition to case law, news articles, law reviews, and even corporate information. Case law, though, is its greatest strength.
Case law, also called precedent, is a grey area where courts interpret laws to resolve situations that aren’t explicitly detailed by statutes (the kind of this-crime-results-in-that-punishment laws passed by a Congress), or which require consideration of extenuating circumstances. Copyright law is a well-known example of this, and what exactly constitutes ‘fair use’ of a copyrighted work is dealt with by the courts. When laws contradict each other, or infringe on the Constitution, courts also determine what parts are valid. The Supreme Court is the most important and powerful actor in this process.
In Nexis Uni, you can search case law by federal or state jurisdictions, and can search by keyword – or, if you are looking for a specific case, the names of the parties or the citation (such as those in the examples above). While courts typically respect precedent, when decisions are overturned, it creates a problem in legal research – namely, the dilemma of when a researcher is looking at a case, whether it can still be trusted as sound law.
In Nexis Uni, this is easy to do. On the right side of the screen, there are a series of symbols. The red warning sign indicates that a key piece of the case has been subsequently overturned. The yellow caution sign indicates that there may be some change, and a green plus sign means some piece of it is still valid. These symbols may refer to the whole decision, or more likely, only a part of it, called a ‘point of law’ or ‘headnote’ in Nexis Uni.
For more information, click the link on the right labelled ‘Shepardize this document’ (it is called this because Shepard’s Citations was a company subsequently purchased by Nexis Uni, that indexed cases by whenever they were mentioned in later rulings or decisions – allowing lawyers and legal scholars to easily discover the subsequent legislative history). The resulting list will detail all later cases that mention the one in question. This list can be sorted by date, jurisdiction, type of citation (warning, caution, positive, or neutral), and by the depth in which the case was handled (i.e., just a citation, or a full analysis).
For example, note that even some parts of overturned cases still stand – while all the ‘separate but equal’ elements of the aforementioned Plessy v. Ferguson case were overturned by Brown v. Board of Education, a few smaller parts of the decision remained in effect.
With this feature, Nexis Uni is a unique and powerful tool for scholars to quickly determine which cases (or parts of cases) are still relevant to current law.
Do you need help using Nexis Uni? Ask Us at iueref@iue.edu or click this button:
