You can search for any word or phrase on FindLaw (or other FindLaw database such as the
Supreme Court Decisions) by just typing the word or phrase into a query form and clicking
the Search button. Searches produce a list of files that contain the word or phrase no
matter where they appear in the text.
Multiple consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in
the same order within a matching document.
Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or
lowercase.
You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (for
English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other
common words), which are ignored during a search.
Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and
proximity queries. For example, if you searched for “Word for Windows”, the
results could give you “Word for Windows” and “Word and Windows”,
because for is a noise word and appears in the exception list.
Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and
comma (,) are ignored during a search.
To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ),
in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (“).
To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the
entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or
words you want to surround with quotes. For example, “World-Wide Web or
““Web””” searches for World-Wide Web or “Web”.
You can use Boolean operators (AND,
OR, and NOT) and the proximity
operator (NEAR) to specify additional search information.
The wildcard character (*) can match words with
a given prefix. The query esc* matches the terms “ESC,”
“escape,” and so on.
Boolean and proximity operators can create a more precise query.
| To Search For |
Example |
Results |
| Both terms in the same page |
mediation and ADR
—Or—
mediation & ADR |
Pages with both the words
“mediation” and “ADR” |
| Either term in a page |
truth or justice
—Or—
truth | justice |
Pages with the words “truth” or
“justice” |
| The first term without the second term |
mediation and not arbitration
—Or—
mediation & ! arbitration |
Pages with the word “mediation” but
not “arbitration” |
| Both terms in the same page, close together |
toxic near tort
—Or—
toxic ~ tort |
Pages with the word “toxic” near the
word “tort” |
Hints:
You can add parentheses to nest expressions within a query. The
expressions in parentheses are evaluated before the rest of the query.
Use double quotes (“) to indicate that a Boolean or NEAR
operator keyword should be ignored in your query. For example, “Abbott and
Costello” will match pages with the phrase, not pages that match the Boolean
expression. In addition to being an operator, the word and is a noise word in
English.
The NEAR operator is similar to the AND
operator in that NEAR returns a match if both words being searched for
are in the same page. However, the NEAR operator differs from AND
because the rank assigned by NEAR depends on the proximity of words. That
is, the rank of a page with the searched-for words closer together is greater than or
equal to the rank of a page where the words are farther apart. If the searched-for words
are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough, and the page is
assigned a rank of zero.
The NOT operator can be used only after an AND
operator in content queries; it can be used only to exclude pages that match a previous
content restriction. For property value queries, the NOT operator can be
used apart from the AND operator.
- The AND operator has a higher precedence than OR. For
example, the first three queries are equal, but the fourth is not:
a AND b
OR c
c OR a AND b
c OR (a AND b)
(c OR a) AND b
Wildcard operators help you find pages containing words similar to
a given word.
