Briefs are written arguments submitted to the court. The justices refer to them in formulating their decisions, and they are important historical documents.

Note: The sources described in this guide include only briefs for cases for which the Supreme Court grants certiorari (i.e. agrees to hear), not for the far greater number of cases that are denied certiorari.

• Party briefs are submitted by the parties to a case. They include:
• Petitioner briefs submitted by the party bringing the case
• Respondent briefs submitted by the party being sued
• Reply briefs by either party in reply to the other’s brief
• Amicus briefs are submitted by organizations or government agencies that are not parties to a case.
• Merit briefs concern the basic issues in the case, rather than procedural questions.
• Oral arguments are presentations by the attorneys for both sides, occasionally interrupted by questions from the Justices.

LEXIS-NEXIS includes all merit briefs from January 1979 to the present, and all procedural briefs from January 1979 to September 1993.

ACCESS

• On the Library Home Page, under Quick Links to Databases, click on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
• Click on Legal Research.
• Click on Federal Case Law.

SEARCHING

• Click on the Guided Search tab near the top of the search screen.
• Enter the names of the plaintiff and defendant, separated by and.
• Example: for the case of Smith v. Jones, enter smith and jones.
• Select Plaintiff from the drop menu to the right of the box. (Although LEXIS-NEXIS has separate fields for Plaintiff and Defendant, both party names can be searched in either field.)
• Select Supreme Court Briefs from the Court drop menu.
• Optional: If you know the year of the decision, enter it under Date in the To: box and the previous year in the From: box. (Some briefs are dated in the year before the decision.)
• If you don't know the year of the case, select All available dates from the Date drop menu.
• Click on Search.
• Click on the title of a brief to display the full text.

SEARCHING BRIEFS BY KEYWORD

The Supreme Court briefs on LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe can be searched by keyword for concepts, earlier cases cited, and names of organizations and attorneys submitting the briefs. Select the Supreme Court Briefs database as described above and refer to the separate guide to Legal Research on LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe for search strategies.

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Supreme Court Briefs on Findlaw

Findlaw provides Supreme Court briefs from October 1999 to date.  The collection is available on or off campus.

ACCESSING FINDLAW

Enter the Web address of  Findlaw Supreme Court Briefs in your browser. (http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/index.html)

The briefs for the cases of the current Supreme Court session, including those that have not yet been decided, are listed in alphabetical order by the petitioner's name. Findlaw also provides a case index (http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/caseindex.html) by subject to the current term's cases.

• Under Briefs, find the title of a brief.
• Click on the format you want:
• PDF is an exact reproduction of the page, but is slow to download and print, and may be too large to be downloaded to a diskette.
• OCR text is scanned from the printed page, but not proofed. It may contain errors.
• Text and RTF are provided by the attorney filing the brief. Text is unformatted and can be displayed on the screen. RTF is formatted; it can be downloaded, but not displayed.
• RTF is formatted text that can be opened by any word processor. It can be downloaded to a diskette but not displayed on the screen.

PRINTING

If you are viewing the brief in PDF format:

• Open the File menu in Adobe Acrobat and select Print.
• Click on OK.

• Open the File menu in the browser and select Print.
• Click on OK.

• From the browser's File menu, select Save as, and select the A:\ drive to Save in.
• Click on Filename and rename the file.
• Choose plain text for Save as type:.
• Clik OK.

WESTLAW has the full text of oral arguments from October 1990 to date. It is available on only one computer in the Reference area of the Library.

NOTE: If you are only interested in the text of a decision, please do not use WESTLAW, which needs to be made available to other users. See our separate guides to Finding U.S. Supreme Court Decisions in Print and Finding U.S. Supreme Court Decisions on the World Wide Web.

ACCESS

• At the WESTLAW terminal, double-click on WESTLAW via Netscape to go to the sign-on page.
• Click on the Client ID box and enter wsc.
• Click on Go.
• Click on the box for Search these databases: and enter sct-oralarg.

SEARCHING

• In the Terms and Conectors Query box, enter the names of the parties, separated by and. Phrases must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Example: the case of Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents is searched as:
kimel and "florida board of regents"
• One or more cases may be retrieved and listed in the left frame.
• The text of the oral argument for the first case listed is in the right frame.
• Click on the number of a case in the left frame to see the transcript of its oral argument.

• Insert an IBM-formatted diskette into the floppy drive.
• Click on the frame that includes the text you want to save.
• Click on the File menu and select Save Frame as.
• Click on the File name box.
• Type a file name ending with .txt in order to save it as plain text.
• Click on OK.
• If your document consists of more than one part, you will need to move from part to part and save each one separately.

• Click on the frame that you want to print.
• Click on the File menu and select Print Frame.
• Click on OK.
• If your document has more than one part, you will need to move from part to part and print each one separately.

Findlaw provides the texts of oral arguments from October 2000 to date. Follow the directions for accessing briefs on Findlaw and under the name of the case, look for Resources and then click on Oral Arguments.

Oyez.org offers audio files of oral arguments from many Supreme Court cases. At the Oyez website, search or browse for a Supreme Court case. If audio files are available, a link for "Audio" will appear in the side toolbar of the webpage for that case.

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Further Research on Law

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