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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Nevada Supreme Court Unpublished Orders are organized by date going back only approximately 4 months.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 Nevada Court of Appeals Unpublished Orders are also only available for approximately the last 4 months.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.
The Caselaw Access Project (CAP) is a project that combines scans of Harvard Law School's Library print collection of official state and federal case reporters with annual updates from Fastcase to expand public access to U.S. law for free.
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 2020. Nevada coverage from the Nevada Reports is from 1868-2013, or 1 Nev. - 129 Nev..
The documents in the CAP are scans of the original publication, so quality of scans will very. The OCR (optical character recognition) identifies words for keyword searching, but may produce an incomplete search result because of the quality of the scan.
CAP is also searchable by citation using the Nevada Reports citataion or recent regional decisions published in the Pacific Reporter. Only the third edition (P.3d) is currently available through Fastcase.
Another alternative for free, full-text searching for Nevada judicial opinions, try Google Scholar. Google Scholar claims to have state appellate cases beginning in 1950.
For information on how to search Google Scholar, please visit the Law Library of Congress for an explanation on how to use Google Scholar to research case law.
If you are an active Nevada State Bar member, your membership includes Fastcase.
"Fastcase includes access to federal and Nevada caselaw, local federal rules, reporters, links to court forms, Attorney General’s opinions, bankruptcy decisions, administrative regulations and other information important to state bar members"
The NSCLL offers public access to Bloomberg Law, Lexis+, and Westlaw Precision through the patron access computers in the library or you can log in to Westlaw using our public access account on your own device onsite at the law library.
These legal resesarch platforms provide a more complete collection of case law as well as a more sophisticated search functionality than either Google Scholar or CAP. For example, you may search for cases in several ways:
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All three legal research platforms also provide links to primary sources cited within the decisions, as well as related seconday sources available through each platform.