This blog has periodically pointed to the steadily growing lag between the release of U.S. Supreme Court decisions and their official publication with the volume and page numbers needed for citation. The first such post was in 2014, over ten years ago, focused on the: Costs of the (Increasingly) Lengthy Path to U.S. Report Pagination. A second, in 2016, asked: Better Never than So Very Late? Both referred to state court initiatives that provided possible models for addressing the issue. A 2018 post contrasted the Supreme Court’s continued reliance on (seriously delayed) print publication with the government’s up-to-date electronic publication of the U.S. Code and the Code of Federal Regulations.
A new Reporter of Decisions, appointed in 2021, has, at last, begun to address the problem. For a review of what is still very much a work in progress, see A New Reporter Confronts the Supreme Court’s Unpublished Decisions (2024). (Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4741050)