Suppose you want to retrieve New York cases that have held state sentencing statutes unconstitutional. Suppose further that when you use synopsis and digest field restrictions, you get mostly cases in which the court declined to hold a particular statute unconstitutional.

Is there a better way?

The solution is to use a West-codenotes field (wcn) restriction. Although it is not listed in the Fields drop-down list on the database Search page, West-codenotes is a searchable field in federal and state case law databases. It appears between the West headnotes and the text in court opinions that held a statute invalid or affected a statute's validity. A West-codenotes field restriction is thus ideal for retrieving federal or state case law in which a statute was held unconstitutional. (Note: This field restriction may not retrieve cases in which older statutory provisions were held unconstitutional, e.g., provisions that have since been amended or repealed.)

For this example, access the New York Cases database (NY-CS) and use West-codenotes, synopsis (sy), and digest (di) field restrictions in your query, e.g., wcn(unconstitutional) & sy,di(sentenc!).