Are the pages among pages of text word for word what the judge said in court, or something else?
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In short, in most of the USA, when the decision of a case is ”reported,” it means the judge wrote an opinion that meets the guidelines for being precedent, so the court system has published it in the official appellate record.
It’s confusing because the same word means different things in different contexts. A “court reporter” is the person who takes down, word for word, what happens in the court room so we don’t have to argue later about exactly what was said. We can just ask the court reporter to create a transcript. What a judge says is important, but it gets its actual legal effect from the written order that embodies her decision. They say “the court speaks through its written orders.”
If and when the case is appealed to a higher court, the transcript and all written orders and briefs are copied and sent to the court of appeals. That is the complete “case record.” The appeals court reads it all, maybe allows the parties to argue their case in person, and sends everybody home while it decides what to do.
When the appeals court makes up its mind, it does so by writing an “Opinion.” The opinion may refer to the transcript and briefs, but does not include them. The Opinion just outlines the important facts of the case, explains the legal reasoning behind the decision, and tells the lower court what to do. This is what gets “recorded” in the official archive of appeals case law, like the “Federal Reporter.” That decision is now “precedent,” meaning that other courts in the same system are obligated to treat it as the law and follow its reasoning.
Unless, of course, it get appealed again to a still higher court. In that case, the entire record would get packed up and sent along, perhaps to end up summarized again in another recorded opinion in the official record of case law.
Edit: correcting autocorrect errors.
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