The 'Recent Opinions" list contains all opinions that have been posted to this site within the last month or so. The way we ascertain the cut-off date for the list is as follows:
Opinions posted at any time during a given month to and through the current date and the preceding month.
For example: During the month of May, all opinions posted between April 1 through the current date of May will be included on the Recent Opinions list. In June, all opinions posted between May 1 through the current date of June will be included on the Recent Opinions list.
* Please note that opinions
removed from the list after the cut-off date, will still be available by
searching, using
either Judge or Keyword criteria.
Before publishing opinions of the Judges of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on the internet available to all users, some forty-five of these opinions were maintained centrally and in a searchable format for use of the judges of that court on an internal - non-public - platform. In anticipation that some of those opinions would also be made available to this internet site, when a judge posted an opinion to that internal location, he or she could also mark it as "public", meaning that that opinion would also be posted on this internet site when this site was ready for the receipt of those opinions.
Upon the readiness of this internet site, those forty-five opinions were first transferred to this internet site. As new opinions were and will be directly posted to this internet site, those newly posted opinions listed as more recent. The publishing date of an opinion refers to the date that the opinion was actually posted on this internet site, not the date of the final preparation of that opinion. The date of preparation normally can be ascertained by opening the document with Adobe Acrobat® and viewing the date of the opinion.