The Pleadings database contains the full text of notable complaints, motions, and appellate briefs filed with U.S. courts and agencies. Some larger documents are provided in PDF format only. Pleadings are selected for inclusion after careful review by Pike & Fischer's attorney-editors. The material in Pleadings dates from 1995 to the present and is updated daily.
Use this field to narrow your search to pleadings with particular words or party names in the case title. Party names are not abbreviated. You do not need to use any special punctuation or commands to search for a phrase. Simply enter the phrase the way it ordinarily appears. If a phrase contains a noise word, your search will skip over that word when searching for it. Use connector, wildcard and stemming tools to fine-tune your results.
| Examples: | America Online (not "AOL") | |
| Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (not "ICANN") | ||
| American Civil Liberties Union (not "ACLU') |
Use this field to narrow your search to pleadings that include a word or phrase within any part of the document, including case title, text, footnotes, or appendices. You do not need to use any special punctuation or commands to search for a phrase. Simply enter the phrase the way it ordinarily appears. If a phrase contains a noise word, your search will skip over that word when searching for it. Use connector, wildcard and stemming tools to fine-tune your results.
| Examples: | fair use | |
| e-mail or email | ||
| infringement and sucks |
back to topUse this field when you know the court or agency where the pleading was filed, or if you're looking for a pleading from a particular jurisdiction.
| Examples: | Second Circuit or 2d Cir | |
| California Supreme Court or Cal Sup Ct | ||
| New York or California | ||
| Australia |
All pleadings have an ILR citation. Use this field to search for a particular pleading when you know its ILR citation.
| Examples of ILR citations: | 6 ILR (P&F) 2090 | |
| 2002 ILRWeb (P&F) 1422 |
Use this field to restrict your search to one or more of ILR's eight topical areas:
- Criminal Liability (CR): includes coverage of computer crimes, search and seizure, and sentencing issues. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to online pornography laws, the No Electronic Theft Act, and the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime.
- Freedom of Speech/Content Regulation (FS): includes coverage of the First Amendment, online defamation, filtering and blocking content, indecency and obscenity, and third-party liability issues. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to the Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, and the Children's Internet Protection Act.
- Intellectual Property (IP): includes coverage of the protections afforded to copyrights and trademarks online, Internet patents, and trade secrets. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.
- Internet Commerce (IC): includes coverage of e-mail marketing, clickwrap licensing, electronic signatures, online sales and business practices, electronic banking, provision of Internet service, computer trespass, and domain name registration. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to the CAN-SPAM Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, and the European Directive on Electronic Commerce.
- Jurisdiction & Procedure (JU): includes coverage of long-arm jurisdiction, venue, service of process, choice of law, and electronic evidence. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to the Zippo test, the Brussels Convention, and the Hague Convention on International Jurisdiction.
- Privacy & Security (PR): includes coverage of online anonymity, the collection and use of personal identifying information, workplace privacy, electronic government, encryption, spyware, hacking, and the interception of electronic correspondence. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and the EU Privacy Directive.
- Taxation (TX): includes coverage of Internet-related state, federal, and international taxation. Use this topic to search issues pertaining to the Internet Tax Freedom Act, Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act, and the Streamlined Sales Tax Project.
- Telecommunications (TC): includes coverage of VoIP, reciprocal compensation, broadband access and other issues regulated by state, federal, and international authorities. Use this topic to search rules, regulations, and decisions pertaining to the Federal Communications Commission and similar regulatory bodies.
This field allows you to search for a pleading by its date or to restrict your search results to a certain date range.
Your search may consists of a group of words or phrases linked by connectors such as and and or that indicate the relationship between them.
| Examples: | apple and pear | « Both words must be present | |
| apple or pear | « Either word can be present | ||
| apple w/5 pear | « Apple must occur within 5 words of pear | ||
| apple not w/5 pear | « Apple must not occur within 5 words of pear | ||
| apple and not pear | « Only apple must be present |
If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, apple and pear or orange juice could mean (apple and pear) or orange, or it could mean apple and (pear or orange).
Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches, but hyphens are not (e-mail will produce results only for e-mail, not email) Use the OR Connector for multiple spellings (e-mail or email).
» More about connectors
A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word.
| Examples: | appl* | « would match apple, application, etc. | |
| *cipl* | « would match principle, participle, etc. | ||
| appl? | « would match apply and apple but not apples. | ||
| ap*ed | « would match applied, approved, etc |
Note that use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word may slow search performance.
You may use the ~ character to extend or stem your search to cover grammatical variations on a word.
| Examples: | test~ | « would also find testing | |
| appl~ | « would also find applying, applies, and apply |
» More search tips