Depublication of California Court of Appeal Opinions

The California Courts website provides case/opinion status information for Supreme Court cases as well as both published and unpublished Court of Appeal cases in California. To check on the status of a particular opinion, you can use this site's searchable Appellate Courts Case Information System:

• To check on the status of a Court of Appeal opinion, on the Welcome page, first select "Appellate District" as well as the specific district in which your case was decided. If you wish to check on whether a final decision has been reached by the California Supreme Court in a particular case that has been granted review by the Supreme Court, use the default ("Supreme Court") search option.
• Click on the Search button and search for your case by case number or by party, attorney, or case name. If you are searching by case number, make sure you use the Court of Appeal case number when checking on the status of a Court of Appeal opinion and the Supreme Court case number when checking on the final disposition by the Supreme Court.
• If you see your case listed in the search results, click on the case's hyperlinked case number, which will provide you with a series of links to access information about the case. For some cases, PDF and DOC links to the court's opinion are also provided. 
• For Court of Appeal cases, the Docket and Disposition links will provide you with information on the publication status of the opinion (published, unpublished, depublished, etc.). The Docket information for Court of Appeal cases will also include a note about whether there was a grant of a rehearing or a review by the California Supreme Court in the case.  

On the California Courts website, you can also find new published opinions from the past 120 days on the site's Published / Citable Opinions page and new unpublished opinions from the past 60 days on the site's Unpublished / Non-Citable Opinions page. Additionally, published opinions from the past two years that are older than 120 days can be found on the site's Published Opinion Archive page. 

• On each of these pages, there is a pull-down menu that allows you to select cases from a particular appellate court/district. The menu for the most recent cases (not the cases on the Archive page) also includes an option for "Review Granted" published/unpublished opinions, which will pull up a list of Court of Appeal cases (going back to the early 2000s) in which there has been a grant of review by the California Supreme Court. 
• After making your menu selection, you can browse the chronological list or use your internet browser's search tool to search for a case by party name or docket number. If you find your case, click on the "Case Details" link next to the name of the case to access the same type of information discussed above (docket, disposition, etc.).  

The California Courts website also hosts the California Official Reports website, which allows free public access to all California cases published in the official California case reporters (from 1850 to the present). This site, powered and maintained by LexisNexis, is "updated monthly, and usually opinions are available within 60 days of filing." As with the subscription version of LexisNexis described on the ...Using LexisNexis or Westlaw page of this guide, when you retrieve a Court of Appeal case on this site, you will find information at the top of the opinion concerning its publication status, including whether the opinon was ordered not to be published or was superseded by a grant of a rehearing or a review by the Supreme Court.

To search for cases on the California Official Reports site, you may need to allow pops-up from this site on your computer. Also, to use this site, you will need to agree to the site's "Terms & Conditions." Be sure to also read the information on the Welcome page from the Reporter of Decisions, which includes the following cautionary note: “Though any individual can research, review and copy the opinions found here, the information is not intended to replace professional legal consultation or online legal-research services."