Nevada Case Law Research Guide

This method of case research assumes you know part of a citation, either party names or information about the volume of the case reporter in which the opinion is published. 

When you have a reporter volume and page information:

• Nevada Supreme Court opinions are published in both the official Nevada Reports as well as Thomson Reuter/West's Pacific Reporter (currently in its third (3d) series).
• It is important to understand How to Read a Case Citation.
• If you have access to either the Nevada Reports or the Pacific Reports, first look for the volume number (which appears on the spine of the book), then flip to the page number provided (which is usually the first page of the case).

When you have only party names:

• Using print resources to find a specific case when all you have is a party name is somewhat more complicated, and the best choice here is to contact the Nevada Supreme Court Law Library for assistance.
• However, there are options to perform this research task in print.
  • One such option involves the Nevada Revised Statutes in print. The NRS is republished every two years (to align with our legislature meeting every two years). In one volume (e.g., Volume 59 of the 2019 NRS), there is an Alphabetical List of Nevada Supreme Court Cases. Unfortunately, this table does not appear anywhere online.
    • This table provides citations to both the Nevada Reports and the Pacific Reporter.
    • Due to the two-year publication schedule of the NRS and minor publication delays that may occur in the production of print volumes of the Nevada Reports, the 2019 table only provides access to cases through 2016.
• Another option for locating parties by case name is to use a volume of the Nevada Reports.
  • This approach presumes you at least know the year (or the general time frame) of when the case was published.
  • Each volume of the Nevada Reports includes a table at the beginning titled Cases Reported. This is an alphabetical list of cases that appear in that specific volume and the page number on which the case begins (because you already know the volume number). This is illustrated below from Volume 133 (2017) of the Nevada Reports.
  • The Pacific Reporter citation is also provided as part of the caption to the case. This is also illustrated below (also from Volume 133).

One other way to perform case law research presumes you are starting with a known statute and you want to find judicial opinions that have interpreted that specific statute. Nevada has three annotated statutory codes to assist with this type of research:

• Nevada Revised Statutes (official publication from the Nevada Legislature) (while the official NRS is available online, the annotations are not)
• Nevada Revised Statutes Annotated (Michies/LexisNexis)
  • This version of the NRS is available online through the Nevada Supreme Court's Digital Library. Please see this guide for information on how you can gain access to the Digital Library. 
• West's Nevada Revised Statutes Annotated

An annotated code means that, in addition to the text of the statute, you get other helpful information to assist you with your research. This includes cases that have interpreted a specific statute.

Although there are three annotated statutory codes, all of them work the same way. Once you retrieve the statute from any of these sources of the NRS, the annotations come immediately after the text of the statute. The case annotations are called Notes of Decisions (West) or Notes to Decisions (Michie's). Because these are print publications, make sure to check the pocketpart at the end of the book for new case citations that may have been added since the hardbound volume was published! 

The official NRS lumps all Nevada cases first, then includes any other cases that cite this statute from other states or federal courts. The case annotations to the official NRS are not updated between legislative sessions, so this may not be the best source from which to identify new cases interpreting a statute.

While all three statutory codes contain annotations, and there will be substantial overlap in case coverage in these annotations, it is editorial discretion as to which cases to cover. This means that some annotated codes may include cases that the others do not. 

Depicted below are illustrations from the three annotated codes for NRS 125.010, Causes for Divorce.

Official NRS

Michie's NRS

West's NRS 

What is a digest? A digest organizes cases into major topics and narrower subtopics. They exist in books as well as online in fee-based services such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. While print digests are still published, they are not frequently used by legal researchers because such research is more efficiently performed online. As such, few libraries continue to purchase case law digests. If you happen to find yourself in a law library, please ask for assistance from a librarian on how to use case digests.