About the 9th Circuit Documents

9CHRIS provides an interface to digitized historical documents from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a United States Appeals Court that presently covers the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, as well as Guam and the Northern Marianas Islands.

The documents in 9CHRIS span a range of dates from the the 9th Circuit Appeals Court's organization in 1891 to approximately the early 1970s.

These documents are of tremendous historical importance. The information they contain can help shed important light on life in the American West in the late 19th and much of the 20th century. While the documents may be useful to understand legal opinions and precedents, they also reveal much about topics including ethnicity, immigration, industrial activity (especially patents, mining, and logging), water and the environment, shipping and transportation, and a host of other topics. Unlike published case opinions, these documents were difficult for scholars to find and use before they were digitized because so few copies existed. As a result, they can now provide fertile ground for new historical insights.

Where did these documents come from?

The documents indexed by 9CHRIS were collected by the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California system. Over many decades, Hastings librarians bound together individual soft-cover documents into large volumes, which they numbered consecutively. Based on gaps in the case numbers used by the Court that are written on the documents, Hastings did not save records from every case submitted for the court's consideration.

These volumes of bound legal documents were loaned to the Internet Archive to be digitized, page by page. 9CHRIS then made use of the Internet Archive's digital copies to create this index. Therefore, if a document was not collected or saved by Hastings, or if a volume was not digitized by the Internet Archive, it does not appear in 9CHRIS.

In particular, there are volumes missing in the sequence digitized by the Internet Archive. It is not presently known whether these exist in paper form and simply weren't digitized, or if they no longer exist at all. See the ?Errata page for more information about problems and missing volumes.

What kind of documents are they?

The documents consist of material that each side in a lawsuit would provide to the appeals court to help the judges evaluate their case. Most common are briefs that outline one side's argument about how the case should be understood. Also common are transcripts of earlier trials, usually at the district court level, often with descriptions of additional "exhibits" or evidence introduced at the original trial. Sometimes drawings, maps, or photographs are included as exhibits as well.

Nearly all of the documents have been printed and are not handwritten. They have been OCRd by the Internet Archive, but the quality of the character recognition can vary considerably. (The uncorrected errors in the title pages in 9CHRIS are clear examples!)

What is not covered?

9CHRIS does not index the published decisions and opinions of the 9th Circuit Court. Such decisions are probably what most people think of when they think of reading a court case. Such court decisions are collected in published "reporters" such as the Federal Reporter and the Pacific Reporter, and can also be found in online repositories such as Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw. Many (though not all) volumes in the Federal Reporter and Federal Reporter, 2nd Edition have been digitized and are freely available from http://public.resource.org.

In fact, if you find an interesting record through 9CHRIS and want to know how the case turned out, you need to find it in a reporter.