WellSettled.com Mines Cases for Established Principles
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How many times have you come across the phrase “It is well settled that …” or “It is well established that …” in a judicial opinion? What if someone collected all these instances and made them searchable? When you are writing a brief or memorandum, wouldn’t it be useful to quickly locate these judicial statements of established principles?
A new website, still in its early stages of development, is doing just that. Called WellSettled.com, it mines judicial opinions for specific types of statements and phrases that either summarize a case or state a legal principle. The idea is that these judge-generated statements carry significant weight when discussing a case or legal principle. If you can easily find them, then you can incorporate them into your own research and writing.
Specifically, WellSettled.com collects three types of statements:
- Case-summarizing parentheticals. When a judicial opinion cites to a prior case, the citation often includes a parenthetical that summarizes the prior case’s legal substance. Because they are written by judges (or their clerks), these parenthetical statements have the benefit of judicial gravitas.
- Unequivocal articulations of legal principles. As noted above, judicial opinions often include statements such as “It is well settled that …,” “It is well established that …” or “It is axiomatic that … .” WellSettled.com extracts these statements and enables you to search for them.
- Case-summarizing sentences. These are similar to the parentheticals discussed above, but extracted from opinions using conventions other than parenthesis.
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