I stumbled onto this online resource this morning by accident. I was reading a law journal article on native Hawaiian land rights which referenced an 1859 Hawaii court case about mortgages. I’m always interested in checking out the footnotes, so I searched online for the case.

And that search led me to Harvard Law School’s Caselaw Access Project. This appears to be a gold mine of legal decisions.

The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library.

CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States.

Our scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Our earliest case is from 1658, and our most recent cases are from 2018.

The project stats page says it includes 18,251 Hawaii court decisions with a total of 105,463 scanned pages. In addition, the 1,693,904 federal court cases appear to include published decisions of the Hawaii District Court and 9th Circuit Court.

There’s a state by state index. Here’s the Hawaii entry.

Hawaii
D. Haw.: Reports of cases determined in the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii. (1900-1917)

Haw.: West’s Hawaii Reports (1994-0)

Haw.: Hawaii Reports (1847-1856)

Haw. App.: Hawaii Appellate Reports (1980-1994)

This is a site that you may want to bookmark for future reference.