Digest

Digest in United States

Digest Definition

A compilation arranged in an orderly manner. The name is given to a great variety of topical compilations, abridgments, and analytical indices of reports, statutes, etc. When reference is made to Digest, the Pandects of Justinian are intended, they being the authoritative compilation of the civil law. As to this Digest, and the mode of citing it, see Pandects. Other digests are referred to by their distinctive names. For some account of digests of the civil and canon law, and those of Indian law, see Civil Law, Code, and Canon Law. The digests of English and American law are for the most part (according to the definition of Digest based on the Cyclopedic Law Dictionary) deemed not authorities, but simply manuals of reference, by which the reader may find his way to the original cases which are authorities.  Some of them, however, which have been the careful work of scholarly lawyers, possess an independent value as original repositories of the law. Bacon’s Abridgment, which has long been deservedly popular in this country, and Comyn’s Digest, also often cited, are examples of these. See alternative definitions of Digest in the legal Dictionaries.

Digests in Legal Research

Provide subject access to cases which are published chronologically in case reporters. Without digests, there would be no efficient way of locating all the cases on a particular subject. Digests provide brief summaries of cases organized by subject. The West digest system is one major system which can serve to illustrate how a digest is structured.

West has organized roughly 400 topics that the West editors believe are the broad topics representing all issues in American case law. These topics range from abandoned property to mental health to zoning. An outline for each topic has been developed which breaks each subject down into its various elements. These may be only a few or may be several hundred. Each of these elements or sub-topics is numbered. Editors at West read each case published, writing as many summaries of the various points of law as the editor deems necessary. Each of these summaries is then assigned a topic and key number according to the outline that has been developed. A case may have only a few of these summaries or it may have several dozen. The summaries along with the topic and key number are published as headnotes with the case in a West reporter. The summaries are also published in the appropriate West digest along with all the other summaries for each particular topic and key number.

To locate cases using the digest system, you must use the appropriate topic and key number. If you do not know what topic and key number have been assigned to the area of law you are researching, you should use the digest’s Descriptive Word Index. As with any index to a research tool, you must search using the words and synonyms that convey your factual or legal issue. For example, assume you wish to locate Massachusetts cases that address the issue of the liability of doctors for failure to disclose information to a patient. To locate the appropriate topic and key number, you would turn to the Descriptive Index for the Massachusetts Digest Second Series.

You might look up several words or phrases in the Descriptive Word Index such as “doctor,” “physician” or “disclosure”. Each of these can eventually lead you to the topic and key number “physicians & surgeons 15(8)”. You would now want to turn to the appropriate volume of the digest where you will fine listed under that topic and key number, summaries of the cases for that jurisdiction and time period which are about mental capacity to commit crimes. Although you will not want to guess which topic the West editors have assigned to your issue, once you know a relevant topic, you might wish to browse through its outline to determine if key numbers other than the one you have will help.

If you already have a relevant case, which you might have found from a secondary source, the headnote at the beginning of the case will give you the topic and key number.

Digests can also provide you with the citations for known cases. If you know the name of the case, the Table of Cases will give you the citation. You should use the Defendant/Plaintiff if you only know the name of the defendant.

A principal advantage of the West digest system is that it is uniform for all state and federal jurisdictions. Thus, a topic and key number mean the same thing for California appellate court cases as they do for the United States Supreme Court. In addition, you may use the topic and key number to search on Westlaw.

Please note that many digests cover specific time periods and do not cumulate information published in previous series. Thus, you may have to check the same topic and key number in several volumes in order to complete your research. As with all legal research, you must be sure to check any pocket parts and updating pamphlets that are provided.

Practical Information

An index arranged by subject matter to the rules of law raised or discussed in reported cases. A digest is the most important and necessary single tool of the lawyer for getting at the law as stated in judicial opinions. The digest is a collection of separate paragraphs, each of which is related to the others only because they belong in the same subject grouping. There is no editorial comment on the case, no statement as to jurisdictional rules, historical developments, majority and minority views. Each rule is there on its own. The lawyer must be constantly on the alert, therefore, to the law’s changes, both by decision and statute. Digests vary in scope. The american digest system (in U.S. law), covering all printed opinions in all American jurisdictions, from 1658 to date, is the most comprehensive. (Revised by Ann De Vries)

Digest in the Context of Law Research

The Thurgood Marshall School of Law Library defined briefly Digest as: A publication which organizes cases by subject matter. Legal research resources, including Digest, help to identify the law that governs an activity and to find materials that explain that law.

Review

“Many authors have commented that print digests are particularly useful for locating legal rules and concepts. Robert Berring has described the digest system as a “universal subject thesaurus” which provides a subject arrangement of every case in the National Reporter System, allowing lawyers to efficiently retrieve cases by subject.1 Barbara Bintliff, in her seminal 1996 article subtitled “Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age,” (Barbara Bintliff, From Creativity to Computerese: Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age, 88 Law Library Journal, 338, 1996) contends that historically digests were the tool lawyers used to discover legal rules. They provide a “syndetic structure for each area of law, allowing researchers to understand the relationship, context and hierarchy of identified rules.”(Barbara Bintliff, From Creativity to Computerese: Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age, 88 Law Library Journal, 343, 1996)

Digest users are able to find cases that expand or narrow legal rules, and provide a context for understanding legal rules, develop arguments and predict outcomes, test ideas against opposing cases, trace ideas back through older cases, find recent cases affirming their interpretation of a rule, see and understand complex relationships between words used in cases, and identify novel arguments.(Barbara Bintliff, From Creativity to Computerese: Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age, 88 Law Library Journal, 342, 1996)

For all the digest’s success in finding legal rules and concepts, many believe it is a resource whose time has come and gone. Digests have been criticized for being too conservative, rigid, and slow to change; for containing classification errors; for possessing the editorial biases of their creators; and for being cumbersome and difficult to use. (Robert C. Berring, Full-Text Databases and Legal Research: Backing Into the Future, 1 HIGH TECH L. J. 27, 35-36, 1986 and Barbara Bintliff, From Creativity to Computerese: Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age, 88 Law Library Journal, 343, 1996) Carol Bast and Ransford Pyle contend that while the digest system may represent the “present paradigm of legal research,” a “paradigm shift” is occurring wherein the computer is replacing the print digest as the tool of choice for legal research (Carol M. Bast & Ransford C. Pyle, Legal Research in the Computer Age: A Paradigm Shift, 93 LAW LIBR. J. 285, 299, 2001 LAW LIBR. J. 13, ¶ 54). Edwin C. Surrency concluded his chapter on digests
in A History of American Law Publishing with a paragraph titled “The Death of the Digest.” Surrency eulogized the once revolutionary key number system and predicted it would be replaced by the computer during the twenty-first century. (ERWIN C. SURRENCY, A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LAW PUBLISHING 127, 1990).” (The Death of the Digest and the Pitfalls of Electronic Research: What Is the Modern Legal Researcher to Do?, by Lee F. Peoples).

Digest in Foreign Legal Encyclopedias

For starting research in the law of a foreign country:

Link Description
Digest Digest in the World Legal Encyclopedia.
Digest Digest in the European Legal Encyclopedia.
Digest Digest in the Asian Legal Encyclopedia.
Digest Digest in the UK Legal Encyclopedia.
Digest Digest in the Australian Legal Encyclopedia.

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See Also

American Digest System, Badger’s General index, Court Reports, Court System in the United States, Court reporter, Curnin’s Index, Digests and American Law Reports, Henry Smythies’ Analytical Digest, Key Number System, KeySearch, Legal topics, National Reporter System, Selective Publication of Cases, U.S. States Court Reports, United States Supreme Court.


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