Unpublished Opinions

This is a post that is probably only relevant to those readers who actually work in the legal field or will work in the legal field, but from the perspective of this One-L, the recent decision by the supreme court to allow citations to unpublished opinions seems to be pretty important. One of the frustrating aspects of learning legal writing is that you often come across a case you want to use in your memo only to find out that it is unpublished, thus holding no precedental value, but beginning in January 2007, this will no longer be the case. There is a long running debate, especially in our 9th Circuit about allowing unpublished opinions, because it will mean more work for appellate judges to write unpublished opinions with greater care, but I have come to law school in the era of online technology. We are given passwords to lexis and westlaw (combined wexis) before we even start school and our ability to access unpublished opinions is the same as published, which is one of the main reasons for changing the rules. It is just hard for me to imagine a time when I would have too actually look for cases in books (that would only contain the published opinions). So for me, I have been wondering since I got to law school why we can't just use the unpublished opinions, because this seemed like a logical consclusion of the way legal research is done, and it seems like the supreme court agrees. It is always good when the supreme court makes a decision that you have felt intuitively since starting school would be a good idea. Here is the text of the rule.