Finding and Searching Federal Court Rules (9/08)
LexisNexis® has different databases for the rules of the Federal Courts online. Some of these sources are contained in group files, but there is generally an individual file as well. The individual databases include the following:
- Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States
- Court of Appeals Rules for each individual Circuit
- Local Rules of U.S. District & Bankruptcy Courts for each state
- Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure
- Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
- Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure
- USCS - Federal Rules of Evidence
LexisNexis also carries the rules from various specialty courts, including the Tax Court, Court of Claims, and Court of Veterans’ Appeals. All federal rules appear in one group file entitled USCS - Federal Rules Annotated. There are also several smaller group files that combine all of the individual Circuit Court rules and all of the local rules for the U.S. District & Bankruptcy courts. The path to files for the federal rules is the following:
Federal Legal - U.S. > Find Statutes, Regulations, Administrative Materials & Court Rules > Court Rules
When searching for rules, there are several segments which help to narrow your search results. For instance, if you want all the hearsay rules in the USCS - Federal Rules of Evidence, use the heading segment and run the following search: heading(hearsay).
If you want to search for a particular rule number or for a specific rule, use the section segment. For instance, to retrieve the Hearsay Rule, run the following search: section(hearsay rule).
When you run free-text searches in any of the rule databases, you search not only the rules but also the annotations to the rules. While this can sometimes be very useful, often you want to find terms in just the text of the rule or in the text, heading, and/or section segments. There are two segments that are useful to achieve these results: text and unanno. The text segment searches only the text of the rule and the unanno segment searches the text, section, and heading segments combined.
To see the difference these segments make, try the following searches using the Federal Rules of Evidence and search for hearsay. The search hearsay retrieves 52 results, the search text(hearsay) retrieves 7 results, and the search unanno(hearsay) retrieves 32 results. By tailoring your search using these segments, you can refine your search to find just the documents you need in a much quicker fashion.
For additional information on using segments, visit the LexisNexis Support Center.
