This section allows you to search through the various opinions published by this court. If you have questions about usage refer to the instructions below. If you are still having problems send an email or call us at 401-626-3140.

When composing a query there are several rules to keep in mind
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Words separated by spaces or ordinary punctuation (which are not listed as special characters in the tables later in this section) are treated as a phrase. The search will only return documents that contain this phrase. However, words within the phrase which are listed in the noise list (such as a, as, and, but, for, etc.) are ignored completely. Matching is also case-insensitive. So searching for

the State; and the County 

will also match

the state of a county.

To search for a phrase that contains quotation marks, or one of the special characters such as an exclamation mark, we have to enclose the whole phrase in quotation marks, and then place double quotation marks where we want a quotation mark to appear. For example,

"he yelled ""Hello!"" from across the street".

To search for several individual words in a document, we separate the words with a comma. The result will be documents that contain all, or only some, of the words listed. The more that match, however, the better the ranking of the result.

Other than that, we can use the normal wildcard and Boolean operators. An asterisk matches any number of characters, and a question mark matches any single character. There's also the option of a fuzzy search. Adding two asterisks to the end of a word will match 'stem words' with the same meaning. A search for

catch**, for instance, will include catching and caught.

To combine words in the search string, we use Boolean operators like this:

Apples & Pears

Apples | Pears

Apples & !Pears

Apples ~ Pears

!@size < 2049