The Syllabi

With a preface by Michael H. Hoeflich, John H. & John M. Kane
Professor of Law, University of Kansas School of Law and an
introduction by William E. Butler, John Edward Fowler Distinguished
Professor of Law, Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of
Law and Emeritus Professor of Comparative Law at University College
London; Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Includes the text of Vol. 1, No. 1 (Oct. 21, 1876) to Vol. 1, No. 26
(April 14, 1877), originally published: St. Paul, Minn.: J.B. West &
Co. 1876-1877.

"In 1876, John B. West, twenty-four years old, launched a new
publication that would within a decade evolve into the National
Reporter System. As a traveling salesman for an office supply company
in St. Paul, young West visited many Minnesota attorneys. He learned
that the official publishers of court reports were chronically slow.
West was later to say that if the official state publishers had been
properly doing their jobs there would have been no need for his
reporters.
His first publication, The Syllabi was an eight-page weekly news-sheet
that contained "prompt and reliable intelligence as to the various
questions adjudicated by the Minnesota Courts at a date long prior to
the publication of the State Reports."

Its immediate popularity among the bar soon forced it to outgrow its
original format and coverage. In early 1877, only six months after it
had begun, The Syllabi was replaced by the North-Western Reporter. The
reporter, another weekly, was also a transitional publication. It
contained the full text of all Minnesota Supreme Court decisions and
Minnesota federal court decisions, as well as those from the Wisconsin
Supreme Court in cases "of special importance." This publication
lasted two years, four semi-annual volumes.

In 1879, West announced a new series of the North Western Reporter
(the first of the modern West regional reporters) that would publish
the full text of all current supreme court decisions from Iowa,
Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and the Dakota Territory.
The Federal Reporter and the Supreme Court Reporter began within the
next two years and, in 1885, West Publishing (as it was incorporated
in 1882) announced the publication of four new reporters that, along
with its current reports, gave it nationwide coverage. (.) The
National Reporter System was soon proclaimed to have "Unquestionably
revolutionized the whole plan of law reporting." --Thomas A. Woxland & Patti J. Ogden, Landmarks in American Legal Publishing. An Exhibit Catalogue 38-40.