Washington Courts: News and Information

New website provides Supreme Court published opinions through territorial days

All published opinions of the Washington Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, dating back through territorial days, are now available free of charge on the new Washington State Judicial Opinions website, at www.lexisnexis.com/clients/wareports.

The intent of the new website is to provide the public with free and easy access to a legal database that has accurate and fully updated versions of the state’s precedential case law.  The new website has the full text of each published opinion from our state’s appellate courts along with introductory background statements about each case. 

The site has a robust search engine, akin to that used by expensive commercial legal databases, to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

Until now, if users wanted to find an online copy of an appellate opinion, they either had to pay for a subscription to an expensive commercial legal database (such as Westlaw or Lexis.com) or they had to rely on free websites that didn’t have fully updated and reliably accurate versions of all opinions. These free websites did not uniformly account for all of the changes made to an opinion after it is initially filed — such as subsequent orders modifying or withdrawing an opinion, as well as the technical changes (grammatical, format, and stylistic corrections) made in the editing process following the filing of the original opinion.

The new website takes into account all of these post-filing changes. 

The opinions on the new website are intended to mirror word-for-word the opinions that are printed in the state’s official set of appellate court opinions – the books and advance sheets that make up the Washington Reports series and the Washington Appellate Reports series.  For this reason, users will be able to quote language from the new website’s opinions with confidence in its accuracy.

“For a long time, we have wanted to provide the public with free, high quality access to the enormous set of published opinions of Washington’s Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, stretching all the way back to 1854, and we are very pleased to offer this website for public use,” said Rick Neidhardt, Washington Supreme Court Reporter of Decisions. 

“We believe this will be an important help to people around the state, especially those who do not have paid access to commercial online databases,” Neidhardt said. “This includes self-represented people, members of the media, lawmakers, researchers, students, and those who are simply interested in learning more about the law.”

The new website will contain only the state’s published appellate opinions; unpublished opinions will not be available there because the new website is based on what is contained in the official Washington Reports and Washington Appellate Reports.

For explanations of the difference between published and unpublished opinions, and of how opinions can change from their initial filing until they appear in the official Washington Reports and Washington Appellate Reports, please visit our definitions page.

For more background about the new website, please visit our background page .

CONTACT:  Washington Supreme Court Reporter of Decisions Rick Neidhardt, Rick.Neidhardt@courts.wa.gov or 360-357-2090.