Historic Cases

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

for the Western District of Michigan

Paul L. Maloney

Chief Judge

Tracey Cordes

Clerk of Court

PRESERVATION OF ARCHIVED FEDERAL RECORDS

The Administrative Office (AO) of the United States has announced that on April 1, 2011, it will begin discarding archived records of federal district court cases which were filed after 1969 and which were archived during the period 1970 to 1995. More than 25,000 cases from the Western District of Michigan will be destroyed.

When a case filed in the district court has been closed, the file, is maintained by the District Court for a period of time, but it is ultimately transferred to the National Archives. To reduce the cost of preserving these records, the AO has decided to discard approximately 80% of them. The AO has no plans to preserve these records electronically. Only the Judgments and the docket sheets of the discarded cases will be kept.

Cases scheduled to be destroyed may be found HERE (MicroSoft Excel format). NOTE: This is a large file and may take time to download

Whether a closed case will be preserved or discarded depends upon the numerical nature of suit code that was assigned to it when the case was opened and/or how far the case progressed before it was closed. The suit codes for all cases filed in United States District Courts have been separated into three categories. Review the codes HERE. If a case has one of the suit codes on List A, OR if the case went to trial regardless of what code it has, the file will be permanently preserved. If the case has a suit code on List B and the case at least reached the issue joined stage, it will be permanently preserved; otherwise it will be discarded. If the case has a suit code found on List C, and did not go to trial, it is scheduled to be discarded.

Cases scheduled to be retained permanently may be found HERE (MicroSoft Excel format).

We are seeking assistance from the community in identifying records that should be retained because they are of significance. In making this determination one may consider cases that:

involved a judge, lawyer, litigant or witness of historical interest or importance (e.g. the lawyer, unknown at the time, became a prominent regional or a national figure);
involved an issue of historical legal interest (e.g. a petition for the writ of habeas corpus from a prisoner being held at Guantanamo Bay);
involved a matter of historical interest separate from the legal issues in the litigation (e.g. an issue about the ownership of a painting by Da Vinci); or
received substantial media attention at the time.

IMPORTANT: If you believe that a case scheduled to be discarded is historically important, please contact our court as soon as possible at historic_documents@miwd.uscourts.gov.

Provide the name of the case and the Judge who presided and, if known, the case number. It would be helpful if you could provide a one or two-line statement as to the significance of the case, along with your own contact information.