Eric Berg reports on the death of the Federal Appendix on the
RIPS Law Librarian blog - The Federal Appendix, a West case law reporter that published ‘unpublished’ opinions from the United States Courts of Appeals, was always an oddity. It collected decisions that were designated by the courts as not fit for publication in the pages of West’s Federal Reporter. This might have been a useful service if it had existed decades earlier, but the Federal Appendix was not introduced until 2001. In a world where ‘unpublished’ federal appellate decisions had been made available electronically on Westlaw and Lexis since the 1980s, the Appendix was redundant from the start. Even before the Federal Appendix, the term ‘unpublished’ was a misnomer. So perhaps we should not be surprised that Thomson Reuters decided to kill off the Federal Appendix in 2021 without much fanfare.
- The final bound volume of the Federal Appendix was volume 861, and the ultimate case by page number was Vittetoe v. Blount Cnty., Tennessee, 861 F. App’x 843 (6th Cir. 2021).
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