JMLS Digitizes Illinois Appellate Court Unpublished Opinions
The John Marshall Law School Library has completed its initiative to digitize its collection of unpublished Illinois Appellate Court opinions. The Library inherited the former Chicago Bar Association collection of unpublished opinions. The collection includes nearly 350 volumes of unpublished opinions from 1900-1975. The opinions, most of which were typed on onionskin paper, are slowly disintegrating due to age and use.
The school received a grant from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries of Illinois (CARLI) to digitize these volumes as part of CARLI’s Book Digitization Initiative. CARLI partnered with the Open Content Alliance to provide digitization services. The partnership seeks to digitize important Illinois materials to build a significant digital collection and to promote access to Illinois materials via digitization.
Researchers can access the digitized unpublished opinions from the website http://www.archive.org/details/johnmarshalllawschool. In order to locater an opinion, one must first locate the appropriate volume of the Illinois Appellate Court Reports. So, for example one looking to access the full text of the unpublished opinion in People v. Dismuke, 66 Ill.App.2d 162, would first need to locate volume 66 of the Illinois Appellate Court Unpublished Opinions, Second Series online and then page forward until reaching the opinion. The easiest way to get started is simply to search for the volume number as such “66 Ill.App.2d.” Page numbers are not indexed.
