Although I haven’t been able to find it on the Supreme Court’s Web Site, Tony Mauro, at law.com reports that the United States Supreme Court has issued a rule to permit citation of so-called “unpublished” opinions to federal judges. The rule, according to Mauro, will go into effect next year — you can’t cite unpublished opinions until then — unless disapproved by Congress before December 1.
These opinions, of course, are unpublished in name only, as they are available on the usual online legal databases. They have been designed to have no precedential value. This has always smacked of private law, application to litigants in one case, only, which seems to go against the entire concept of a rule of law. At one time these opinions were published only locally, and not in the West reporters, and were known mostly to practitioners who happened to be involved in the individual cases. I’ve always thought them as a strange part of the system, and am pleased to see the status of these things change.
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