Maryland Case Law Search: Find Appellate Court of Maryland and Supreme Court of Maryland Opinions in Plain English

How do I search Maryland case law?

Describe the issue as a full question rather than a keyword string, then read the results with the December 2022 rename in mind. This is the single most common way a Maryland search comes up short. If you search for "Supreme Court of Maryland" you will miss every opinion that court issued before December 14, 2022, because those are captioned Court of Appeals of Maryland. If you search for "Court of Special Appeals" you will miss everything the Appellate Court of Maryland has decided since. The controlling authority on your question is very often on the other side of that line, and nothing in the result list warns you.

The reporters are the reliable thread through all of it. Maryland kept Md. for the high court and Md. App. for the intermediate court, and the abbreviations did not change when the names did. So 445 Md. 123 and 262 Md. App. 456 tell you which court decided the case regardless of what that court was called at the time. When you are checking whether you have the whole line of authority, search by reporter rather than by court name.

Then apply the ordinary checks. Confirm the opinion was reported, because an unreported Maryland opinion is not precedent and can only be cited in narrow circumstances. Confirm the Supreme Court of Maryland has not granted certiorari since the opinion issued, which matters more in Maryland than in states with appeals of right, because the intermediate court is where most appeals actually end.

Can you cite an unreported opinion in Maryland?

Sometimes, and the conditions matter more than the headline. Maryland Rule 1-104 was revised effective July 1, 2023 to permit citation of unreported appellate opinions for the first time, and the coverage most of that change received flattened it into "Maryland unreported opinions are citable now." The actual rule is a three-part test, and an opinion has to clear all three parts.

First, the date. Only an unreported opinion of the Supreme Court of Maryland or the Appellate Court of Maryland issued on or after July 1, 2023 may be cited for persuasive value. Anything older is still off limits. Second, the necessity condition, which is the part almost no summary mentions: such an opinion may be cited "but only if no reported authority adequately addresses the issue before the court." That is a genuine limit, not a formality. If reported Maryland authority covers the point, citing an unreported opinion on it is not permitted, and a court can reasonably read a brief that leans on one as a concession that no reported case helps you. Third, the per curiam carve-out: an unreported per curiam opinion may not be cited for precedential or persuasive value at all, regardless of its date.

Two more pieces of Rule 1-104 are easy to miss and both come up in practice. Unpublished decisions from other jurisdictions may be cited as persuasive authority if the issuing jurisdiction would permit it, and the Appellate Court publishes an appendix listing the jurisdictions it understands to allow that, covering all federal district and circuit courts plus the appellate courts of more than twenty states. And if you cite anything that is not available in a publicly accessible electronic database, you have to attach a copy of it to the filing. Nothing in any of this makes an unreported opinion precedent. It is not, and it never becomes one. Our guide on <a href="/blog/can-you-cite-an-unpublished-opinion">when you can cite an unpublished opinion</a> compares the federal rule and other states, and <a href="/blog/published-vs-unpublished-opinions">published versus unpublished opinions</a> explains why courts designate them at all.

Where can I find Maryland case law online for free?

The official opinions are free. The Maryland Judiciary publishes reported and unreported opinions of both appellate courts as they are filed, the Maryland Rules and the Annotated Code are available online, and Google Scholar and CourtListener carry Maryland decisions with better full text search than the official site offers. For a straightforward question with a clear answer, that is often enough.

What the free sources do not give you is a citator, a plain-language holding, or any signal about the two Maryland-specific traps on this page. A free database will happily return a 2019 Court of Special Appeals opinion and a 2024 Appellate Court of Maryland opinion in the same result list without telling you they are the same court, and it will return unreported opinions alongside reported ones without flagging that one of them is precedent and the other one is conditionally citable at best. Those distinctions are exactly what determines whether a case belongs in your brief. The enterprise platforms close the gap with editorial treatment flags and the KeyCite and Shepard's citators, at a per seat price a three-lawyer firm in Annapolis or Silver Spring has a hard time justifying. We lay out the category in the <a href="/legal-research-software">legal research software</a> guide and the real numbers in the <a href="/legal-research-software-pricing">legal research software pricing</a> breakdown.

One habit closes most of the remaining risk. Whatever tool you use, run the treatment check as a separate step rather than assuming the search surfaced it, and check the reporting status of every case before it goes in the brief rather than only when you first found it. In Maryland that second check carries an extra question that most states do not ask: if the opinion is unreported, does reported authority already address the issue? If it does, Rule 1-104 does not let you cite the unreported case at all. Our walkthrough on <a href="/blog/how-to-check-if-a-case-is-still-good-law">checking whether a case is still good law</a> covers what the signals actually mean.