The following is a guest blog post by Andrew Winston, Senior Legal Reference Librarian at the Law Library of Congress, and Brian Kaviar, an intern at the Law Library of Congress.
The Federal Courts Web Archive, recently launched by the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team and the Law Library of Congress, provides retrospective archival coverage of the websites of the federal judiciary. The websites in this archive include those of the Supreme Court of the United States, as well as federal appellate courts, trial courts, and other tribunals. These sites contain a wide variety of resources prepared by federal courts, such as: slip opinions, transcripts, dockets, court rules, calendars, announcements, judicial biographies, statistics, educational resources, and reference materials. The materials available on the federal court websites were created to support a diverse array of users and needs, including attorneys and their clients, pro se litigants seeking to represent themselves, jurors, visitors to the court, and community outreach programs.
The federal courts were created under the United States Constitution. Article III, section 1 provides for the U.S. Supreme Court, and such lower courts that Congress may establish. These lower courts include the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the U.S. District Courts, and the U.S. Court of International Trade. In addition, other federal courts have been established under Article I, section 8 of the Constitution