Supreme Court Dockets Or What Is That Number?

A student writes "I need to find this Supreme Court case...I was given the names of the parties and a number with a dash in the middle. What is that number, and how do I find the decision?"

The number is a Supreme Court Docket Number, the first part of which is the year the case was placed on the docket with the Court, and the second is essentially the case number. It's a case number, not a decision number, really. In principle, it is possible for decisions to be rendered in a different sequence than their docket numbers.

This SCOTUS site explains docket numbers and lets you search for case names and decisions by docket numbers, too.

What to do in Lexis Nexis: the best thing to do is to look by the parties e.g., Locke v. Karass, rather than trying to search them with the docket number (07-610) too.

The only way I'm aware of to search by docket number in Lexis Nexis Academic is to do a US Federal & State Cases search and look for the docket number as a keyword. Limit your search to the court (e.g., US Supreme Court) to avoid a lot of noise. Not nearly as efficient as searching by citation or parties, but it can be done!

Just for fun, try in the SCOTUS Docket Search, then in Google, then in LexisNexis...

• Fitzgerald v. Barnstable 07-1125
• Locke v. Karass 07-610