State court records, federal dockets, and where each lives

Federal dockets

Federal suits sit on a federal docket, and a federal judgment reaches land in a state by borrowing that state's own rules.

Whether the public can read every federal district, bankruptcy and appellate docket, and at what cost, is a question this page will not answer. Access rules for the federal electronic docket system are not covered here. What the law settles is narrower and more useful: what a federal judgment does once it exists, and where it has to go to bind property.

Property in a state is bound by a federal district court judgment the same way that state's own judgments bind it. 28 U.S.C. 1962¹ makes it a lien to the same extent and under the same conditions, ceasing to be one in the same manner and time. But the state's docketing or recording step applies to the federal judgment only if state law lets federal judgments take that step. So the federal judgment does not float above the county register. It has to climb in through the same door, and only where the state props the door open.

Florida and New York both prop it open. Florida's clerk records judgments of a United States court with jurisdiction in the state, along with notices of lis pendens in actions pending in those courts. Fla. Stat. 28.222(3)(b)² and (c) name both. In New York, a transcript of a federal judgment rendered or filed in the state may be filed with any county clerk, who then dockets it with the same effect as a supreme court judgment entered in that county. CPLR 5018(b)³ is the hinge. One more move exists: under 28 U.S.C. 1963⁴ a money or property judgment is registered in another federal district by filing a certified copy, once it is final by appeal or by the time to appeal running out, or earlier when the rendering court orders it for good cause.

State court portals

Most of what a creditor reads is at the county clerk, and in Florida the clerk keeps two different kinds of record of the same case.

Florida's clerk of the circuit court keeps a progress docket, which notes every pleading, motion and paper filed and every step the clerk takes in the case. It is indexed alphabetically, direct and inverse, under Fla. Stat. 28.211⁵, and each filing carries a date-and-time stamp under Fla. Stat. 28.13⁶. The docket is the running account of the lawsuit. Recording the final judgment is a separate act: Fla. Stat. 28.29⁷ requires final judgments and orders of dismissal in civil actions to be recorded in the official records. A judgment that was never recorded is still a good judgment. That same section says failure to record does not affect its validity, which means a parcel search can come up empty against a debtor who lost a case and owes the money anyway.

What a county publishes online is a separate matter, and the terms differ by county. In Broward, the appraiser's office says recorded court judgments, liens, lis pendens and notices of foreclosure can be searched on the county Records Division site at no fee for viewing. That same office warns that the Clerk lists foreclosure cases only by case number and sale date, never by property address, so a creditor who only knows where the debtor lives cannot search those by the one fact at hand. Florida recorders also may not post images of family, juvenile or probate court files to a public website. Fla. Stat. 28.2221(5)(a)⁸ keeps those off the open site, which means a search that finds nothing in those categories has found nothing because it was never allowed to look.

New York publishes less on the face of a docket entry, and more inside it. CPLR 5018(c) sets out what a judgment docket entry holds: each debtor's name and last known address, the creditor's name and address, the sum in figures, plus the dates and times of the judgment-roll filing and of docketing. That is a fuller record of the judgment itself than Florida's progress docket gives of the suit. Which New York and Florida court records are searchable online, and on what terms, is not something this page settles. The register in front of you is real; the question of what a website shows of it is a different one, and counsel or the clerk answers it.

Two searches, not one

One court system answers only for itself, which is why a creditor who runs one search has answered half the question at most.

Federal courts and state courts do not share a docket. A clean federal search says the debtor was not sued in federal court; it says nothing about the county courthouse down the street, and the reverse holds too. Treat the two as separate questions because the law does.

When a suit belongs in federal court rather than state court turns on federal jurisdiction statutes, and those are not laid out here. The threshold figures do appear: 28 U.S.C. 1332(a)⁹ gives federal courts original jurisdiction over civil actions where the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 and the parties are, among other kinds, citizens of different States. But whether a given suit could or did go federal is a lawyer's call on the facts, and the share of suits that land in each system is a statistic this page does not have and will not invent. What a search can show is bounded, which is the subject of a companion page on what an empty result actually means.