Vol. 5, No. 5 (May, 1995) pp. 143-145

UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT REPORTS (CD-ROM). Van Buren, Arkansas: Law Office Information Systems (1-800-364-2512). $50.

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Segal (SUNY at Stoney Brook)

A few years ago, armed with a CD-ROM player and nothing but music CD's to put into it, I began searching for the United States Supreme Court Reports on CD-ROM. As a political scientist specializing in public law, no other resource short of Lexis (more on that later) would so dramatically improve my day-to-day efficiency. Finding nothing available, I briefly flirted with the idea of forming a partnership and creating such a CD with a few colleagues. Soon thereafter Lawyers' Cooperative and West produced CD's of the Supreme Court's decisions, but there was one hitch: they were charging about $3,000 each for the set. For lawyers otherwise paying $4 per minute for Lexis that might be a bargain, but it was well beyond what I was willing to pay. Knowing that the marginal cost of producing CD's is about $1.25, for once in my life I made a smart economic decision: I decided to wait. And wait I did. Every six months or so I would call West and Lawyers, to no avail, to see if prices had fallen. Duopolies, it seems, are no better than monopolies. But because a recent project of mine requires extensive use of Supreme Court opinions, I began to think that I would have to bite the bullet and pay the $3,000. To my everlasting relief, I waited a bit longer.

New to the legal software market is the Law Office Information Systems' (LOIS) United States Supreme Court Reports. While the current CD only goes back to 1950, the company continues to backdate its holdings and has the entire Reports scheduled for completion within 24 months. While the CD has some very nice features that I will discuss shortly, it has one truly exceptional feature: a $50 price tag. According to Kyle Parker, the company President, the $50 price will not change as the series is backdated to 1 Dallas!

The program installs under DOS in less than a minute and is clear enough that I was able to use it without referring to the online manual. One can search for information in a variety of fields, including the name of the case, the attorney listings, the syllabus of the Court, the text of the majority, concurring, or dissenting opinions, the authors of the majority, concurring, or dissenting opinions, or any combinations thereof. It took the computer 13 seconds to find the five cases where "Brown" and "Board of Education" appeared in the title of the case, a second or two to find the one case where "Bakke" and "Regents" appeared in the title, five seconds to find the 31 cases since Bakke to have cited Bakke, and five seconds to find the 31 cases where Thomas authored the majority opinion for the Court. While Lexis and other services can do similar types of searches, they do not, for the most part, have separate fields for different parts of the decision and thus will produce far more false positives. For example, locating every case where Thomas and "majority opinion" appear within 10 words of each other in Lexis will probably find many instances where Thomas was not the author of the majority opinion. The program took just a few seconds to find the 51 cases where Douglas wrote the majority opinion and Frankfurter wrote a dissent.

Page 144 follows:

Some searches take longer though, and it took nearly six minutes to find the 625 cases where the phrases "Solicitor General" and "amicus curiae" appeared in the same paragraph in the listing of counsel. I found no false positives in the 20 of these cases that I examined, but I'm sure complete examination would find a few. But by limiting its search to the listing of counsel, cases where "Solicitor General" and "amicus curiae" just happen to show up in the text of the opinion do not appear. Other features include a hypertext listing of cases, so that clicking on a citation to a case returns that case. The program easily allows the entire contents of an opinion to be saved to disk as a file, and portions of the opinion can be saved to a file through familiar cut and paste routines. A feature that will much delight casebook authors, sequential cut-and-pastes can be saved and appended to a single file. Furthermore, footnotes, which appear in the body of the text in Lexis, appear at the end of the text in LOIS, but can be immediately accessed through hypertext.

Accuracy is ensured by duplicate keyboarding of each case and using DOS's compare-file program to find discrepancies. The company reports an accuracy rate of 99.9997%, which, if accurate (my unsystematic comparison to the U.S. Reports found no errors), makes the program substantially purer than Ivory Soap. Pagination is keyed to the official United States Reports and does not include either the Supreme Court Reporter's of the Lawyers' Editions' pages. Indeed, as West Publishing claims copyright protection over its page numbers (!), to include Supreme Court Reporter pagination would invite costly litigation. Cases not yet published in the bound U.S. Reports volumes retain the pagination of the official slip opinions.

An update subscription can be purchased for $200 per year, or users can simply repurchase the entire CD whenever they feel the need for $50. The subscription includes quarterly updates of the CD and a software system that automatically downloads new cases to your hard drive on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Because the master index is kept on your hard drive, all searches will be up to date. Furthermore, when you receive your updated CD's, the installation procedure automatically deletes recently downloaded cases residing on your hard drive. I have not tried this, but with instant Internet access to recent Supreme Court decisions, my preference would be to buy the $50 CD without the subscription, and then repurchase the product at the same price as they backdate further and as I feel the need to update.

The program is not without its faults, and though relatively mild, they should be mentioned. First, I found that while searching for "Brown" and "Board of Education" under case name turns up five hits, searching for "Brown" and "Board of Education" and "Topeka" turns up zero hits. Second, though a DOS program, LOIS is supposed to be executable from within Windows (and OS/2, and Macs running PC Pro). On my office computer I could not get the program to run Setup from Windows, nor would it run under the MS-DOS prompt from within Windows. (I had no troubles with the Windows setup using my home computer.). Also, I was originally unable to use the hypertext features

Page 145 follows:

from my computer at home. I called LOIS's toll-free technical support number and was speaking to support staff within 10 seconds. They quickly solved the latter problem (my hard drive needed a label), but were unable to figure out what combination of my 23 device drivers, QEMM memory manager and/or other features might have been causing the Windows conflict (yes, I can hear you Mac users chuckling). I thus need to exit Windows to run the program, but that still beats running to the library. Finally, the number of printer options for printing the manuals was essentially limited to Hewlett-Packard and Epson. As both my printers are Hewlett-Packard, I experienced no problems, but I can't vouch for the emulation in other printers.

For Supreme Court scholars without free access to Lexis or Westlaw, this program is a godsend. But while those with free access to Lexis might find the value added of LOIS's CD to be marginal, advantages still exist. For one, as noted above, LOIS can limit searches to the syllabus of a decision, the majority opinion, the dissenting and/or concurring opinions, or any combination thereof. This is fortuitous for me as I am working on a project with Harold Spaeth that requires a list of progeny of landmark cases, which we operationalize in part as citation of the landmark in the syllabus of future cases. We can readily do this from LOIS. Similarly, finding all cases where one justice wrote a majority decision while another justice dissented in particular terms turns the program into a miniature (in terms of variables available) Supreme Court database. Finally, for most Lexis users (i.e., those not networked into it), freeing your phone line and avoiding mid-afternoon slowdowns might make the $50 price a worthwhile investment.

The absolute hardware requirements are quite minimal: an IBM AT or better running DOS, 640K RAM with 500K RAM available to LOIS, 2Mb extended or expanded memory, 5 Mb of free hard disk space and an ISO 9600 compatible CD-ROM drive. LOIS recommends a 386 or better computer with 4 Mb of extended or expanded memory, 10 Mb of free hard disk space, an MPC Level 2 compatible CD-ROM, a color monitor, and a mouse. I ran the program on my 20 MHZ 386 with a Soundblaster CD and my 50 MHZ 486 with a Toshiba CD without difficulty, except as noted above. This is a wonderful program at an exceptional price. If you have free access to Lexis or Westlaw the program's price and value added make it well worth considering for Supreme Court scholars. If you don't have such access, buy LOIS's Supreme Court Reports now.