The Supreme Court Reporter is published by a private publishing house, the West Publishing Company. Printing was started with the decisions of the October, 1882, session. Advance sheets with final page numbering are issued on a semimonthly basis; however, the advance sheets do not supply “star paging” or parallel citations to the official reports, which can be found in the bound volume. The decisions in the advance sheets are, however, the same text of the decisions found in the bound volume.

West prepares the case summaries and headnotes and assigns each headnote a key number. Summaries of the judicial issues that make use of these key numbers and assigned topics appear in other West publications.

The advance sheets and the bound volume both contain tables of cases, phrases, and statutes. In 1986 in order to compensate for the delay in publication of the final bound volumes, West also began to publish a temporary “interim edition” of the bound volumes in two or three volumes.

Putzel, Henry, Jr.

Reporting of opinions

United States Law Week

United States Reports