Why shepardize a case

Westlaw Patron Access provides access to primary materials from both federal and state courts. Information includes cases, statutes, regulations, briefs, dockets, legal forms, secondary sources, KeyCite, Litigation Analytics and more. Limited to 5 users at a time.

KeyCite in Westlaw. Here is what KeyCite looks like after clicking on the red or yellow flag:. Report a problem. Search this Guide Search. What is "Shepardizing"? Shepardizing - Why "Update" a Case? With the doctrine of stare decisis , attorneys use previously decided cases as examples in arguing current cases with similar legal principles or fact patterns.

Attorneys can argue in court that the issues or facts in their trial should be decided the same way as similar cases were previously decided. Positive treatment includes: Followed Affirmed Approved. Shepardize a Case: Nexis Uni An easy way to Shepardize a case is: First, find the case you are interested in; go to the full text of case. Click on link in right-hand column: Shepardize this document. The automatic view is for all Citing Decisions.

In the left-hand column under Narrow By , look at the categories under Analysis. If not overruled, it still might have some negative treatment. Click on icon for Grid View in the upper right-hand corner of the screen for a court-based view or date-based view of the citing decisions. To use KeyCite: Find a case; go to the full text of case.

Try Oyez to find information to find your case citation. It has a much less complicated interface than Nexis Uni, so locating the citation information for your case here can save you time and frustration later. Shepard's allows you to track the citation history of a court case. When you "Shepardize" a case, you will see all of the other cases that have cited that case, and if they treated the case favorably or unfavorably.

This is how you can tell if the law in your case is still considered "good law" or if it has been overturned or challenged by other cases. Shepard's is only available through Nexis Uni, and has been around for more than years. It is a very common and important process in legal research.

You may have heard of or remember the O. Simpson murder trial -- many programs recently have delved into the many facets of the complicated, and, at times, bungled case. You can see one of these "bungles" here -- prosecutor Marcia Clark and her team are caught by Judge Ito having not properly Shepardized the case law they are basing their argument on -- the case law in question had been challenged and overturned by a subsequent case.

Shepard's helps you to avoid such problems. You will then be given a customized citation search form in which you merely have to enter the volume number and page number from your citation as shown above.

When you enter your citation, you will retrieve the Shepard's Summary like the one below , which tells you if there is anything in your case's history that negatively impacts the authoritativeness of your case, as well as the different types of treatment given to your case by later cases. For example, if you are interested in the status of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals case Paternostro v. There were also some cases that positively treated the case indicated by the "followed" designation.

Because at least one part of the Paternostro opinion was overruled, a red stop sign symbol is placed next to the Paternostro citation. This symbol is reserved for opinions that have been overruled, reversed, or negatively impacted in some other significant way. If you scrolled through the Shepard's report for the Paternostro case, you would eventually get to the "Citing Decisions," where you would find out which cases treated the Paternostro case in the various ways described in the Summary.

For example, the screen shot below indicates that the Paternostro case was overruled by the 5th Circuit in the case United States v.