Supreme Court of the United States Reporter of Decisions

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Seal of the Supreme Court

The Reporter of Decisions of the United States Supreme Court is the official charged with editing and publishing the Court's decisions both when announced and in the bound volumes of the United States Reports. The official title of this officer was changed from "Reporter" to "Reporter of Decisions" in 1953, to clarify the duties of the office at the request of Reporter Walter Wyatt with the authorization of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson.

The first two reporters acted in an unofficial capacity. Only in 1816, after the Supreme Court had existed for a quarter-century, did Congress create an official post of reporter. It then added a $1,000 a year salary in the Judiciary Act of 1817. The reporter also profited from selling the printed volumes of the reports of decisions. In 1874, Congress for the first time appropriated funds to publish the volumes; from that time the report was known as the United States Reports and numbering began as if Dallas's first volume was number one. In 1922 the Government Printing Office took over publication of the United States Reports.

The Reporter of Decisions is responsible only for the contents of the "United States Reports" issued by the Government Printing Office, first in preliminary prints and later in the final bound volumes. The Reporter is not responsible for the editorial content of unofficial reports of the Court's decisions, such as the "Supreme Court Reporter" or "Lawyer's Edition" published by private firms.

[edit] List of Reporters

The reporters of decisions are listed here with their tenures and the numbers of the volumes of the United States Reports they edited. Until volume 90, the volumes were also by the name of the reporter and the numbers of those nominative reports are listed after the U.S. Reports numbers. The post was vacant from 1944 to 1946.