Dockets, filings, and court records

Nature of Suit

Nature of suit is the three-digit code the court assigns a civil case to describe what it is about, such as 440 for other civil rights.

The code comes from the civil cover sheet the plaintiff files with the complaint. It drives the judiciary's own statistics and it is the most useful filter in any federal case search, because it lets you ask for every employment case or every patent case in a district instead of guessing keywords.

The code is a label, not a legal ruling. It is chosen by the filing party, it is occasionally wrong, and it never changes when the claims change. Treat it as a strong hint rather than a definition of the case.

For research, the code is the difference between browsing and guessing. Combining a nature of suit code with a district and a filing year gives you a defined population of cases, which is how anyone measuring litigation trends assembles a data set rather than a pile of anecdotes.

How it appears on a docket

The docket header shows Nature of Suit: 442 Civil Rights: Jobs, Jurisdiction: Federal Question, Cause: 42:2000e Job Discrimination (Employment).

Related terms

  • Complaint — A complaint is the document that starts a civil lawsuit, naming the parties, telling the court why it has jurisdiction, and laying out the claims.
  • Docket — A docket is the court's official numbered list of everything that has been filed or has happened in a case, in date order.

More on dockets, filings, and court records

See this term in a real case

Search federal court records and read the filings where nature of suit actually shows up. New to federal dockets? Start with how to find a federal case.

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