West's National Reporter System (NRS) is a set of case law reporters for federal courts and appellate state courts in the United States. It started with the North Western Reporter in 1879 which has its origin in The Syllabi (1876, ). Federal reporters Federal reporters include: State reporters For the purpose of state court reporting the 50 states and the District of Columbia are divided into seven regions as follows: These regional reporters are supplemented by reporters for a single state like the New York Supplement (N.Y.S. 1888–1938; 2d 1938–) and the California Reporter (Cal.Rptr. 1959–1991; 2d 1991–2003; 3d 2003–) which include decisions of intermediate state appellate courts. The New York Supplement covers both intermediate appellate courts and state trial courts, since there is also an official reporter for the latter in New York State. In states without an official reporter, many attorneys and law firms balked in the pre-Internet age at the considerable expense of subscribing to a West regional state law reporter when all they really needed was case law from the appellate courts of their home state. This caused West to produce so-called "offprint" reporters for specific states like Texas and Missouri, of which there are now around 30. With the sole exception of Illinois Decisions (which is consecutively paged), all cases in offprint reporters maintain the volume and page numbers of the regional reporters from which they were taken. In other words, the contents of the offprint reporters look like the relevant regional reporter after all cases from unwanted states have been deleted. Additional information Indices of citations are provided by Shepard's Citations while the West American Digest System offers access by hierarchized keywords and headnotes. The NRS reflects the massive volume of reported American case law: over 100,000 court decisions are published by the NRS each year. Today, the NRS is the primary publication route for opinions from the federal courts of appeals, the federal district courts, and state appellate courts in many states that currently do not have an official reporter (either because they never had one or they are one of the 21 states who abolished their official reporter in favor of the NRS). The NRS is available at law libraries throughout the United States, and is also available through online legal research databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis. Since the NRS now comprises over 10,000 volumes, and many older cases have been overruled