Question

... Question: Assume that you want to read the court’s entire opinion in the case of Baker v. Permo, 268 Or.App... Assume that you want to read the court’s entire opinion in the case of Baker v. Permo, 268 Or.App. 406, 342 P.3d 142 (2015). Read the section entitled “Finding Case Law” in the appendix that follows this chapter, and then explain specifically where you would find the court’s opinion     How would you go about looking up this citation? Where would I go to look it up?

Answer 1

Finding case law:

Use of Digest:

Digest books: West have listed every topic and key number with the citation and also printed a brief summary of every case dealt with that issue.

Digests are divided by jurisdiction and time period that loosely match every reporter system. As there is so many case law thats why more recent editions only have cases in the past three years.

In this case we have already a case on point, we can just pull the digest for the jurisdiction and time period (i.e.2005) we are interested in and look up the topic and keynumber.(BAKER  v. Premo, 268 Or.App. 406, 342 P.3d 142(2005)

Use of citation: In this case we have a citation given, it makes the work is almost done for us, we need to translate the citation into a location on the bookshelf. As we know, A citation have different parts such as

• the case name,
• the volume number,
• the reporter abbreviation,
• a page number.

For example: BAKER  v. Premo, 268 Or.App. 406, 342 P.3d 142(2005)

In this case,BAKER  v. Premo denotes the case name and The first number, 268, denots the volume number located on the spine of the book.

The middle part, Or. App. denotes the abbreviation for the reporter, in this case It is Court of Appeals of Oregon;

The number 406 denots the decision number; 342P. denotes the volume number , 3d denotes 3D series and last number 142 denotes first page of report on which this case starts. Last (2005) denotes the year in which the case was decided.

So, in this case , Court of Appeals of Oregon; Bryan BAKER, (Petitioner-Appellant), Vs. Jeff PREMO, Superintendent, Oregon State Penitentiary, (Defendant–Respondent.Decided: January 07, 2015

To find the court opinion , we can Use a legal database

For that we need to go to a legal database to find the full text or courts opinion of this particular case. We can decide to use an open access database like CanLll, else we can also use subscription legal database of one of the library  Like westlawNext or Quicklaw. But remember, Main text of the legal case will be the same, for any of the database you choose to search.

How to use CanLII to Find a Case

1. we can Search by case name: Baker V. Premo

2. we can search by case citation: 268 Or.App. 406, 342 P.3d 142(2005)

How to use WestLawNext to Find the court's opinion

1. Under the Tab "ALL content" there are different options such as  

• Primary sources
• Commentary
• Court documents
• Finding tools

we have to choose the option under "Primary source" there is an option of "Search cases and decisions".

Under this we will get two options - By jurisdiction , By topic . we need to limit to the "legal jurisdiction"and then we can Search by case name or case citation.  

• This way we can find the correct case and court's opinion from results.

A = we can check for the same year of decision.

B = we can see if there is any of the case citations line up.

C = we can also ensure the level of court.