The Caselaw Access Project offers free, public access to over 6.5 million decisions published by state and federal courts throughout American history. Because our mission is providing access to legal information, we make these decisions available in a variety of formats through a variety of different access methods.

One of our most important ways of sharing cases is through the basic case display. If you come across a case on Google or anywhere else on the web and click on the link, you’re likely to land on the case display.

We’re constantly thinking about better ways to present the range of information we have about each case. One of our latest improvements has been to update how headmatter is shown so that information about a case (such as the list of attorneys or, for older cases, public domain headnotes or other supplemental content) is distinct from the actual text of the case.

Here’s an example of what that looks like:

Case view of "Whaling v. Shales" (1839) showing headnotes and attorneys highlighted above the text of the opinion.

Our goal is to share as much information as we possibly can about each case. But we want to make sure that the information is clear and readers can easily navigate all the distinct elements of the case.

If you have other ideas for how we can improve case display, please reach out to us anytime at info@case.law.