When you first log into Lexis Nexis, you will see the page below. There are two different places for you to begin your search, but the one that will work best for the purposes of your project in this class is the first one in page, which is highlighted in yellow.
There are two drop down menus at the right hand side of the box which will help you narrow your search results. The first one filters for publication year, and the second one filters for content type. Both are highlighted in yellow below.
If you click the drop-down menu to filter by year, a number of options will appear allowing you to limit the date range that you want your search results to have come from. If you already know the year your court case was decided, you can choose a time range that includes it. If not, you can select "All available dates."
If you click on the drop-down to limit content collection, you will be guided throgh a series of menus based on the options that you select. These allow you to tell Lexis Nexis where specifically to look for the information that you are going to be searching, and will narrow your search results. For this project, we are going to be searching for Supreme Court Cases, so the most useful option is for us to select "Legal" in the first menu, "US" under the "Cases" heading in the second menu, and finally checking the box next to "United States Supreme Court" under the "Court" heading in the third menu. This will limit your search results to ONLY judicial cases at the US Supreme Court Level. Lexis Nexis hold a lot of information across multiple disciplines. If you know exactly what you are looking for, as we do in this case, it's helpful to filter results up front so that there is less to sift through later. Screenshots of this process are shown below.
In this example, I am searching "miranda," hoping to find the Miranda v. Arizona SCOTUS case. Below, you can see the Miranda v. Arizona case is now at the top of my results list. This is because I have already told Lexis Nexis to only show me court cases, at the U.S. Supreme court level. Had I not specified this, there would be multiple categories listed alongside the "Cases" heading in the left-hand column. If you are ever searching and find that this has happened to you, clicking the "Cases" heading will redirect you away from non-court cases.
If you are ever searching and need to filter your results further, there are options to narrow your results in the left-hand column as you scroll down the page. In general, this will require you to know additional information about the case that you are looking for, whether it is the timeframe when happened, the court that it was in, attornies who argued the case, judges who ruled in it, etc. This information can often be found through other sources linked on the first page of this guide, and then brought back to Lexis Nexis.
When you click on the name of the case you are interested in, the full record for the case gets pulled up. Below, you'll see a clip of the record for Miranda v. Arizona. This record is where you will find most of the information for your assignment, but it is important to know where to look, and where not to look.
The first thing you will encounter is the case citation, and you actually encounter that in the title of the case. However, for a full list of citations, look for the section titled "Reporter." This is a full list of citations of all of the law publications, or Reporters, that this case was published in. The first citation is the U.S. Reporter, the second is the Supreme Court Reporter, and the citations that follow are for Reporters from additional lower courts.
The next important section for you to review is the Case Summary, highlighted below for you to note placement. The Case Summary will give you a broad overview of the case, and may mention some details of importance to this assignment. However, it will not go into much depth. That will be found in later sections.
The next two headings, Lexis Nexis Headnotes and Lawyer's Edition Display, aren't going to be of much use to you in this project. (These sections would be of most use to lawyers, and in this context are mainly Lexis Nexis advertising its other products within a case.) The sections can get rather lengthy, so if you'd rather shrink them down to avoid scrolling, click the little triangle to the left of the heading name to collapse the sections.
The Syllabus of a legal case is like the abstract of an academic journal article. It will give you a fairly detailed outline of all of the key components of a case. This is a key section for your investigation in this project.
The Opinion section will provide the full rationale for the holding for the court. These can be lengthy, but will also provide complete detail towards the resolution of the issue before the court. The judges/justices writing the Opinion will be noted at the top of the section.
The Dissent section will provide the opposing view to the court's holding. While not explicitly required within the parameters of your assignment, viewing the Opinion and Dissent in tandem will give the fullest picture of the decision. The judges/justices writing the Dissent will be noted at the top of the section.
Your assignment also requires you to trace the procedural history of your selected case. The easiest way to do this in Lexis Nexis is using the Shepard's box that appears next to the case when you are viewing it. The first step is to click the "Shepardize this document" link, highlighted at the bottom of the image to the left.
Clicking that link brings you to Shepard's results for your case, in the case of our example, Miranda v. Arizona. However, as we can see from looking at the box in the top left corner, these results are currently showing us citing decisions, not the appellate history. This will be the default when you Shepardize your case, but you can very easily see the appellate history by clicking on that option in the box.
Now that the appellate history option has been selected, there is a full list of the decisions prior to the Miranda v. Arizona decision, as well as subsequent decisions. There are multiple ways to view this information, beyond just a list, accessible by clicking the boxes in the top right corner of the results page. The other most useful option can be viewed by clicking the pie-chart icon.
If you click the pie chart icon, the full appellate history of the case will be mapped via chart, demonstrating the court levels, as well as the passage of time. There will be a pin on the graph noting where the root-case you are conducting your search from is located in the context of the larger history, and the cases whose holdings have precidence in the appellate history will be indicated with blue squares.
