Readers, I am happy to announce a new Letters Blogatory feature that I hope you will find helpful. You can now search my archive of thousands of posts for posts on cases decided in a particular jurisdiction. I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of months coding the archive. This was a fun project, as I got to go backwards in time and remind myself what was on my mind in 2020, 2015, and even 2011, when I was in my thirties!

All of the “back end” work has been done. I am still trying to figure out the “front end,” which will be an advanced search page that you can use to click on the jurisdiction you want, or to create custom queries (for example, “all case decided by the federal court in Massachusetts that have to do with the Service Convention since 2015”). But I’m not quite there yet, so for now, you have to do search via the URL that you type into the browser. For US cases, here is the basic rule. For cases in state courts, the URL should end with the two-letter abbreviation for the US state or territory. For example, if I want to see all cases from the New York state courts, I would type:

https://lettersblogatory.com/jurisdiction/ny

For cases in federal courts, it is a little more complicated. If you want all the cases decided in a particular district court, you start with the two-letter state abbreviation, followed by the abbreviation for the district. For example, the District of Massachusetts is ma-d. The Southern District of New York in ny-sd. So if you want to see all cases from, say, the Northern District of California, you would type:

https://lettersblogatory.com/jurisdiction/ca-nd

If you want to see all cases, in the court of appeals and in the district courts, from a particular circuit, you use the number of the circuit. Here, for example, is a search for all the cases in the 11th Circuit.

https://lettersblogatory.com/jurisdiction/ca-11

Eventually there will be a code for cases decided by the court of appeals in addition to a code for all the cases decided by any court in the circuit, but I am not there yet.

There are some special rules for the US Supreme Court (scotus), the DC and Federal Circuits (ca-dc and ca-fed), the Court of Federal Claims (cofc), and maybe a few other stray ones.

For non-US cases, use the country’s three-letter code from ISO 3166. The main reason for this is to avoid conflicts between, say, Argentina and Arkansas, or California and Canada. Some of these are not intuitive for English speakers (e.g., deu for Germany, or gbr instead of uk for the United Kingdom), so please click the link and check the list of abbreviations if you’re having trouble. Here by way of example is a search for Argentine cases:

https://lettersblogatory.com/jurisdiction/arg

For EU courts, use eu. For other international tribunals, the rules vary (icc, itlos, and icj should be clear, others less so). If you really want all US cases, use usa.

Here are a few notes about this new feature:

• I have not distinguished between district court cases and bankruptcy court cases. So ny-sd will pull all cases from the SDNY and from the Bankruptcy Court in the SDNY.
• I have not categorized non-US cases, other than by country, and I have not categorized US state-court cases, other than by state. I may at some point try to do some more taxonomy to improve this.
• I have not tried to sort out non-US or even US constitutional complexities. So, for example, Gibraltar is its own tag (gib), which I think is technically correct as it is not part of the United Kingdom, but I have not tried to be accurate about this.
• Most importantly, please note that Letters Blogatory is not Westlaw or Lexis or BALII or whatever other database you use professionally. My database of cases is not comprehensive, and I did the coding on my living room couch, often while my cat was sitting on my laptop keyboard. So there are probably mistakes in there. Please don’t rely on this for real legal research.

That’s it! I really hope you’ll find this new feature interesting and useful. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

Image credit: Stephencdickson (CC BY-SA)