Generally
Court opinions are not copyrighted and therefore can be found in a variety of sources and formats. Courts first issue opinions in individual pamphlets known as slip opinions. Very recent opinions can also be found in electronic databases, on court websites and in print loose-leaf services. Some court opinions also get published in a case reporter, which is a multi-volume print compilation of opinions arranged in chronological order. Each case reporter contains opinions from one or more jurisdictions. Whether an opinion gets published in a case reporter largely depends largely on which level of court the case is from.
At the beginning of each case in a case reporter is a summary (sometimes called synopsis) of the case as well as one or more headnotes, which summarize the major points of law from the main court opinion in the case. Summaries and headnotes can be helpful in understanding the key rulings/holdings in a case, but always remember that these tools are produced by the editors of the case reporters, not the judges who wrote the opinions (though the language used is often the same).
Publication of Federal Case Law
In the federal court system, all opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court are published in case reporters. However, this is not true of all lower federal court opinions. Only a small percentage of federal Court of Appeals opinions and an even smaller percentage of U.S. District Court cases are published in reporters. With respect to the Court of Appeals, each circuit court establishes criteria for determining which opinions will be "published," which in this context, means published in a case reporter. These criteria can be found in each circuit's local Court Rules. Each circuit also has their own rules regarding whether "unpublished" opinions may be cited as authority and what precedential value should be accorded them, though there is a general federal court rule that states that any federal Court of Appeals opinion issued after 2006 can be cited as authority in any circuit.
Note: Because courts use the term "published" to mean published in a case reporter, the terms "published" and "reported" are often used interchangeably.
