Nevada Case Law Research Guide

Although the Nevada Appellate Courts website does offer immediate access to recently issued opinions from the Nevada Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, it is not an ideal source from which to research Nevada case law. 

The Nevada Appellate Court's homepage makes very prominent a case lookup search. Note that the only two search options are case number and "caption contains." The caption would contain the names of the parties, but would not contain woulds identifying the subject matter of the case. 

The Nevada Appellate Court's website also provides a link directly to the Nevada Reports, but only for those volumes that have not yet been published in print. Looking for a case from this website requires that you have a citation (including a volume and page number). There is no way to search the text of these opinions.

Nevada Supreme Court Unpublished Orders are organized by date going back only approximately 4 months. This type of search requires knowing a party name and time frame of when the opinion was issued. Nevada Court of Appeals Unpublished Orders are also only available for approximately the last 4 months.

For relatively new opinions that have not yet been published in print volume of the Nevada Reports, the Appellate Court's website provides links to advance opinions going back approximately 6 years.

The website also posts forthcoming opinions, usually on Thursdays, though there is no guarantee that any opinions will be released on a Thursday.

If you need to do FREE full-text searching for a large chunk of PUBLISHED Nevada judicial opinions, Google Scholar is the best option. Google Scholar claims to have state appellate cases beginning in 1950.

The Law Library of Congress has created a wonderful explanation of how to use Google Scholar to research cases. The guide also includes a video demonstration.

NOTE: If you are accessing Google Scholar within Nevada, Google will be able to recognize your location and wil default to searching Nevada case law (or at least it should if you have location services enabled on your browser).

The Caselaw Access Project (CAP) includes official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States.

Their scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Their earliest case is from 1658, and the most recent cases are from 2018. Nevada coverage through the Nevada Reports is from 1868-2013.

While you can search case law on this website, be prepared to be a little disappointed. All of the documents in the CAP are scans of the original publication, so quality of scans will very, which means that the keywords you are using to search may be missed because the quality of the scan was too poor.

You may also retrieve cases from CAP when you know the citation.

The NSCLL offers public access to Westlaw Edge (the newest version of Westlaw) on the public computers in the library or you can log in using our public access account on your own device.

Westlaw provides a more complete collection of case law as well as a more sophisticated search functionality than either Google Scholar or the CAP. In Westlaw, for example, you may search for cases in several ways:

• By a known citation (e.g., 115 Nev. 321)
• Full text keyword searching using either plain language expressions or Boolean connectors (e.g., AND, OR, NOT, etc.)
• By Digest/Topic searching (searching the digest by topic to retrieve all cases from Nevada that have been assigned to that topic)
• By party names
• Using proximity searches (e.g., car /2 accident = cases that include the word accident within 2 words of car)
• By very specific date ranges (not just years) (e.g., 1/1/2021-6/3/2021)
• By judge who wrote the opinion or who participated in the decision
• By attorneys who represented the parties in the case
• Searching within concurring or dissenting opinions