A New (to Me) Data Source for Legal Research Junkies:
The Westlaw TRIALORDERS-ALL database, which contains "selected civil trial court orders from state trial courts state trial court opinions." Most of these are, to my knowledge, not findable in the ALLSTATES database.
TRIALORDERS-ALL has been around for at least a couple of years, but I hadn't heard of it, so I assume that many of our readers wouldn't have heard about it, either. Potentially very useful if you're researching the kinds of issues that only rarely make their way to appellate courts, or if you want to figure out more details about what happened at trial in a particular case that did go up on appeal.
Another interesting database: STATE-FILING-ALL, which contains various filings in state trial courts.
It's unclear what the distinction is between XX-TRIALORDERS and XX-CS (the state case law databases that contain reported opinions but also many unreported opinions). If you are searching a state's case law in just XX-CS you could miss out on a relevant opinion from XX-TRIALORDERS. One wonders if TRIALORDERS should just be rolled into CS.
As a lay person, I most likely can't care less for what goes on at the State Supreme Court level. My only concern, really, is, if I get into a bar fight, how likely am I to get arrested, and for that matter, whether the guy who I got into a bar fight with ever has.
Probably true, but how would you teach that in a law school class? "Today's Lesson: How Likely You Are to Get Arrested Following a Bar Fight, and How to Minimize Your Chances."
In addition, many of the legal questions that laymen would care about can actually be answered with free tools, including trusty old Google. For example, someone once asked me what the maximum penalty is for a fourth degree misdemeanor under Ohio law. I didn't go to Westlaw for that one.
Trial orders are always from the lowest level state court. With a few exceptions (NY, PA, MA... a few more), these lower court decisions were never published, or in most jurisdictions, ever released in any format. Even in jurisdictions that released or published lower court decisions, they were comparatively sparse compared to appellate case law. This is different than in Federal court where the district courts regularly release their decisions.
I will say that your suggested lesson, and others like it, might actually be the best attended, observed, and understood classes in law school, if they were actually taught.
Every so often, it would be nice to learn the black letter law that is up-to-date, practical, and relevant to the life of a law student. Fiege v. Boehm 123 A.2d 316 is useful for its contract ramifications, but I remember it because of Maryland's bastardy laws of the 1950s, not because of its definition of what can be made a contract.
I should have been clearer. The XX-CS databases for many states include unpublished state trial court opinions. In particular, NY-CS and MA-CS include opinions from those states' respective trial courts that were not published in, Misc. (NY's official trial court reporter) or Mass. L. Rptr. (an unofficial trial court reporter started 15-20 years ago by a private local publisher). So what's the difference between an unpublished trial court opinion in MA-CS and an unpublished trial court opinion in MA-TRIALORDERS that warrants putting them in separate databases?
This is exactly why I'm a fan of the idea that legal education should be split entirely into something like a PhD in legal studies or jurisprudence or whatever, probably taught out of the polisci department, and a separate practice-oriented "this is how to be an attorney" program in the professional law school.
Hell, as things stand right now, I get the sense that paralegals and police officers tend to have a far better idea of what *laws* (as opposed to The Law) actually are than probably about 90% of law school grads.
(Sorry. Just feeling grumpy tonight. Hey, you kids get off my lawn!)
Man, that was my thought too!
This database does seem like it could contain lots of very useful information.
That said, I don't want to have the followup conversation about the thousand-dollar bill this research generated.
As a lay person, I most likely can't care less for what goes on at the State Supreme Court level. My only concern, really, is, if I get into a bar fight, how likely am I to get arrested, and for that matter, whether the guy who I got into a bar fight with ever has.
--and your concerns are in turn impacted by what goes on at the state supreme court level. But yeah, my clients don't need to be and generally are not very interested in abstract legal questions or the daily work product of courts; they pay me to worry about such things.
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