Federal Cases

[2] But opinions of those courts issued prior to 1880 had been previously published in a variety of separate reporters from dozens of private entrepreneurs.

That is, as with other NRS reporters, the cases included were annotated by West attorney-editors with "headnotes" summarizing their holdings, and the headnotes were then indexed for easy cross-referencing to similar cases through the West American Digest System.

Republishing all those old cases within the NRS framework meant that subsequent generations of lawyers and judges would be able to resort solely to West reporters to access the entire extant universe of post-1789 case law from all federal courts inferior to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The disadvantage of alphabetical order is that it makes sense only if all the cases to be included were gathered at the beginning.

In an era before modern computerized databases, errors were inevitable, with the result that volume 30 ran through Z, then started over again at A to include a few more cases (and other miscellaneous materials) omitted the first time around.