We suggest starting your research with the Texas Supreme Court Case Files Custom Search, an index to digitized Supreme Court case files available in the Texas Digital Archive. Search options include parties, cause of action, case number, year filed, county of origin, court jurisdiction, and names of district court judge and attorneys representing the parties.

The tips below were prepared prior to the creation of the Custom Search, but you may still find them useful for your research.

Supreme Court records on the TDA can be accessed here. After clicking this link, proceed to the next section: Locating the M Case File Number.

You can also navigate to the Supreme Court records by clicking on “Texas Judiciary” from the TDA main page, shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1.

Click on the “Supreme Court” icon, then click on "Click here to enter the records" (see Figure 2, below).

Figure 2.

Locating the M Case File Number

Before you begin, we suggest using List view to display results. To toggle to List view, click the “List view” icon near the “Sort by” box, shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3.

Next, click on the “Indexes and Registers” folder (see Figure 4, below).

Figure 4.

Indexes can include the names of the parties, the filing date, and citations to published opinions. Select the index for the time period of interest, then select the index range that includes the last name of one of the parties. These indexes are generally arranged in alphabetical order by last name of the party. Scroll through the document for the name(s) of interest. For cases filed between 1840-1892, you will want to locate and make note of the M-case number (see Figure 5, below).

Figure 5.

Please note that this index may not include all M case files, and not all M case files listed in the index are currently in the custody of the Texas State Archives.

Locating an M Case File in the TDA

Once you have located the M case file number, you will want to navigate to the Texas Supreme Court page again, as shown in Figure 2 above. Then click on the “Case files” folder and “M Case files” (see Figure 6, below).

Figure 6.

You will see a list of case files (see Figure 7, below).

Figure 7.

Scroll down to the case file number that you located in the index. Continue scrolling to prompt the page to load more records.

Note the leading zeroes. For example, M-232 will be listed as M-00232 (see Figure 8, below). Click on the case file number to view the records.

Figure 8.

Some case files, like M-29, may have multiple images associated with the case file (see Figure 9, below). If a court transcript is present, it will typically be the first file, with supplementary documents following. A case may have more than one transcript, so it is useful to review the supplementary documents.

Figure 9. This case file has three scanned documents.

Click a document to view it in a document viewer (see Figure 10, below).

Figure 10.

Handwritten documents do not have Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so you will not be able to use "find" or "search" functions to locate text within the document.

Our collection of digitized Texas Supreme Court records is growing. If you don’t find the records you need, please contact us at ref@tsl.texas.gov and include information about the case such as the party names, date filed, and case number if known.