A Brief History of Legal Publishing

We saw it many times across sixteen years: Jack McCoy, maverick prosecutor from TV’s Law & Order, talking shop with his fellow attorneys or going toe-to-toe with defense counsel behind closed doors.

If you look in the background of such scenes, you’ll see familiar-looking books lining the walls: tan tomes with red stripes up top, black ones lower down.

Ever wondered what these books are? Volumes from West’s National Reporter System. 

Reporters are series of books that publish federal and state case law from across the country. McCoy’s books are probably from the New York Supplement, which covers opinions and decisions issued by the state courts of New York. They could also be from the North Eastern Reporter, a regional reporter that includes New York as well as Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Ohio.

Sign the petition to show that Americans love their libraries!

Origins of Legal Materials

Legal publishing wasn’t always so organized. It got its start in the 1480s when William de Machlinia printed the English Year Books, handwritten law reports dating back to the thirteenth century. 

Lawyers at this time, as part of their professional training, wrote down notes of pleadings in court, dialogue between lawyers and judges, and statements of law. They did not record every case, and the recordings they made typically lacked the names of the parties or the outcomes of the cases. Machlinia also gave the world the first book of statutes, the Nova Statuta, published in 1485 but dating back to 1327.

More collections of statutes and cases appeared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as did treatises (big explanatory texts about the law), legal manuals and dictionaries, form books, and summaries. When the Year Books were discontinued in 1535, other reporters took up the task of publishing cases, naming the works after themselves — e.g., Hutton’s Common Pleas Reports. This practice continued into the nineteenth century in England and the United States.

Of the leading treatises, the most influential was William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Unlike most European nations, whose Roman-inspired legal systems were heavy on statutes and codes, England had a common law system, relying on actual cases to establish precedents. Common law has more room for interpretation, which explains the need for treatises. Blackstone’s was the most readable and, therefore, the most popular.

After the American Revolution, the new United States began to develop its own system of law. “Official” case reporters, published at state rather than private expense, replaced the patchwork of named reporters that had followed the colonists from England. 

States also began publishing statutes, and as legal training moved from apprenticeships to law schools in the late 1800s, textbooks of law began to appear. One example was the casebook, a collection of cases condensed to their essentials on a particular topic — still the primary texts in law schools today.

Take action today to support libraries!

John West

Every industry has its game changers. Henry Ford took the automobile, a plaything of the rich, and put it in every home in America. Ray Kroc bought a little hamburger joint from the McDonald brothers and turned it into the world’s largest restaurant chain. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs oversaw a new era in personal computing.

In legal publishing, that game changer was John B. West. 

By the 1870s, case reporting was a diffuse, unsophisticated, and maddening business. State court clerks often waited as much as a year before publishing court decisions, which, due to new precedents, were already outdated. Moreover, attorneys west of the Mississippi had trouble getting legal books from East Coast publishers, making it hard for them to do research for their cases.

West changed all that. A bookseller for Minnesota-based D.D. Merrill, he knew the complaints of his attorney customers, so in 1872, he quit Merrill and established his own company to focus on the local bar. He created a line of legal forms, reprinted hard-to-find treatises, and produced a much-needed index to the Minnesota statutes.

In 1876, West and his brother, Horatio, released a weekly journal called The Syllabi, which summarized “each decision of the Supreme Court of Minnesota . . . with an abstract of the case itself, and when the decision is one of general interest and importance, with the full opinion of the Court.” This eventually grew into the North Western Reporter. Other regional reporters soon followed. Within ten years, West’s system covered the entire United States.  

Sign the pledge to vote for libraries!

Modern Legal Publishing

More than a century later, West, now a Thomson Reuters subsidiary, publishes cases in every federal and state jurisdiction, indexing them with this same topic and key number system. A few states publish their own case reporters, but most have outsourced the job to West, as has the federal government, which publishes its own version of US Supreme Court cases but not those of the lower courts.

In addition to West, other major legal publishers emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of these, LexisNexis became West’s biggest competitor. Lexis began as Mead, a paper manufacturer, which in 1968 acquired Ohio-based Data Corporation, a defense contractor that had been working on a fascinating little project: the nation’s first legal research database. Eventually, it acquired noted legal publishers Matthew Bender and Michie, adding their treatises to its database. (West, of course, developed a competitor product, Westlaw.) In 1994, Mead sold LexisNexis to the Netherlands-based publisher Reed Elsevier, now known as RELX.

A final company to mention is Bloomberg Law, which is part of Bloomberg L.P., owned by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. It distinguishes itself from Westlaw and LexisNexis by focusing less on primary sources (cases, statutes, regulations) and more on news and analytical content, thanks to its 2011 acquisition of the Bureau of National Affairs, or BNA, a major legal news publisher. 

Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries.

#librarymarketers: Enjoy this story? Want to use it for your library newsletter, blog, or social media? This article is published under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International and is free to edit and use with attribution. Please cite EveryLibrary on medium.com/everylibrary.

This work by EveryLibrary is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0