9CHRIS: 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System

Welcome to the 9CHRIS project. To get started looking for documents by searching their titles and keywords, use the Search Box in the upper-right. To search through the text of the documents on a page-by-page level, use 9CHRIS full-text search (beta version).

9CHRIS serves as a gateway to a set of historical records from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, from 1891 to the late 1960s. This court is a federal appellate court, to which cases from lower federal courts were appealed. Cases originated in courts in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, the Pacific Islands, and the U.S. District Court of China. When a case was appealed, participants on both sides of the lawsuit assembled and printed important information for the court to consider. Sometimes this was information from the previous trial, such as a transcript or evidence, and other times the participants created new documents, such as briefs explaining their side of the lawsuit.

These documents were collected together by the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, and bound together in large volumes to serve as a reference. These volumes were later digitized by the Internet Archive in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and made available to the public though their website. Unfortunately, there wasn't an easy way to find a particular case, or even to determine what's inside each digitized volume. 9CHRIS was developed to help do this, by collecting the title pages for the documents in each volume and generating keywords from the records as well.

9CHRIS was created and is maintained by Eric Nystrom.


Recent News Updates

New: Full text searching 9CHRIS
Posted Wed Mar 14 11:37:00 2018
First thousand volumes hand corrected
Posted Fri Dec 8 15:53:00 2017
Documents updated with better keywords
Posted Mon Jun 2 14:23:48 2014
Initial upload of documents complete
Posted Mon Feb 18 19:12:51 2013