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You can't Shepardize® case law when doing research on laws and decisions on the VersusLaw site. You can
Shepardize® case law on citations, products and services available from the
Shepard’s Company and online exclusively from
LexisNexis.
But the good news is that for Premium and Professional Plan subscribers, V.Cite, our new case
law citation search tool, can approximate the same result. When doing case law research at the Supreme Court,
federal, or state level, V.Cite enables you to use search terms such as “california,” “georgia,” “texas,” “arizona,”
or the name(s) of defendants or plaintiffs to get a result similar to a Shepardized® case law. Additionally, the
following example demonstrates a work-around doing it the old-fashioned way.
- Search for the opinion by its formal case law citation: 491 U.S. 1
This search will retrieve Pennsylvania v. Union Gas, 491. U.S. 1 (S. Ct. 1989), and
all case law that have cited to it.
- When the hitlist appears, use the “Find” function under the Edit menu of your browser to jump to the case
law on the list that includes the case law citation. Enter the case law citation "491 U.S. 1" in the dialog box
that appears when you select Edit, Find.
- The other case law on the hitlist are opinions in which Pennsylvania v. Union Gas has been cited. In your
research, you can open these opinions and again use the “Find” function to jump directly to the discussion of
Union Gas within the opinion.
Because some of the case law on VersusLaw do not yet have the formal or parallel case law citation added, a
search for the case law citation may retrieve opinions that have cited to the opinion you want, but will not
retrieve the actual opinion. In this situation, you will need to run a search for the party names by following
these steps:
- Search for case law using the names of the parties (as they appear in the formal citation for the case)
and the "within" search operator:
Pennsylvania w/10 Union Gas
This search will retrieve “Pennsylvania v. Union Gas” or “Union Gas v. Pennsylvania” and all case
law research results that cite to them.
- When the hitlist appears, open one of the opinions retrieved.
- When you have the opinion open, use the "Find" function under the Edit menu of your browser, entering one of
the party names in the dialog box:
Find: Pennsylvania
The browser will jump to the point in the opinion where "Pennsylvania" appears. HINT: Use "Find next"
to see every instance in which "Pennsylvania" is cited in the opinion. For Premium and Professional Plan users,
use the First Hit and Next Hit buttons.
You can obtain more specific results by adding terms to your search.
(Pennsylvania w/10 Union Gas) w/10 (overrul* or revers* or modif*)
Repeat step 3 using the "Find" function of your browser to find one of the terms from your search query.
For Premium and Professional Plan subscribers, a new case law citation research tool, V.Cite, is
available. By entering the case law citation in the V.Cite form, you can determine the validity of the cited
case, as well as review case law examining similar issues. The search can be further narrowed by appending a search
term to the case law citation search. See the
V.Cite FAQ
for further details.
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