U.S. District Court of Rhode Island Opinions

Search Logic

When a search is performed, each individual term is broken down and matched against various different fields; the two most important being the parties and the actual opinion. By default, words will be split by the logical AND operator +. So, for example, if you do a search for:

Burden of Proof

it will be treated as:

Burden + of + Proof

This will match all opinions that contain the words in any order, and then return results with the matches most like the search phrase listed first. All searches are limited to the top 250 results and are not case sensitive.

Also note that the index only includes cases going back to 2005. Older cases are not included in the index and will not show up in searches unless a case after 2005 has cited it.

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Search Modifiers and Operators

To split words by logical OR instead of AND, use the | operator.

Burden | of | Proof

To search for an exact phrase, surround it in double quotes.

"Burden of Proof"

If a particular term should always be present, precede it with the + operator. Conversely, if a particular term should never be present, precede it with the - operator. As examples, if you want opinions with burdens of proof particularly related to FLMA, you could do:

"burden of proof" +fmla

If you instead wanted to search for opinions related to FLMA without a burden of proof, you could do:

flma -"burden of proof"

If you wanted to search for Corpus, but did not want any results with Habeas included, you could use:

corpus -habeas

The wild card operator * can be used at the end of words to account for different word endings. It can not be used at the beginning or in the middle of words; it will be ignored.

When searching for a particular phrase, you can limit how far apart the words in the phrase can be by using the fuzzy ~ operator followed by the max difference. For example, if you wanted to search for "Clerk of Court" but wanted to account for small variations, such as Clerk of the Court, you could use:

"clerk of court"~2

Multiple terms or clauses can be combined and grouped together with parentheses to form sub-queries. For example, if you wanted to find all the opinions with either burden of proof or burden of persuasion you could use:

burden of (proof | persuasion)

In summary, searches support the following operators:

• + signifies AND operation
• | signifies OR operation
• - signifies NOT operation
• " wraps a number of tokens to signify a phrase for searching
• * at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
• ( and ) signify precedence
• ~N after a word signifies edit distance (fuzziness)
• ~N after a phrase signifies slop amount

In order to search for any of these special characters, they will need to be escaped with \.

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Searches against a Party

Hits against a party name require 2 matching terms or 75% for longer searches, rounding down. If you enter in one or two terms, those terms must match. If you enter in three terms, 2 of them will have to match. If you enter in four or five, 3 will have to match, and so on. Hits against a party name will be favored over hits against opinion text and, consequently, will generally show up at the top of the results.

Search modifiers and operators are ignored when matching against parties.

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Searches against an Opinion

Hits against an opinion require 3 matching terms or 75% for longer searches, rounding up. If you enter in a search of one, two, or three terms, 1, 2, or all 3 terms will need to be matched respectively. A search for four terms will require 3. A search against five will require 4, and so on.

When a search is performed against an opinion, two variations are performed. The first does not modify the terms of the search phrase. If you search for Continuing, it will only look for that term exactly and favor any of those hits over the second variation. The second variation performs a stemming process, shortening each term to a root form. This makes it possible for common variations of the same word to be matched. For example, the search for Continuing will also match words like Continuance, Continue, Continued, etc.

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Searches against a Case Name

Most hits against a case name must be exact, and any hits will be favored heavily over any other field. Currently the following formats for a case will work (as an example):

2012cv4046
12cv4046
2012-cv-4046
12-cv-4046
12-4046
12 4046

Other formats will likely work, but are not guaranteed to be favored over other hits. The first two formats will only return opinions for that exact case. The rest will also include any opinions which cite that case but, as a side affect of the search logic, will also include any opinions that simply contain the numbers entered.