Rhode Island Court Records

Rhode Island Court Record Lookup

Rhode Island RI court records are public documents, available to anyone who makes a Rhode Island court records search. In Rhode Island, court documents may be used to establish child support, collect an inheritance, correct a driving record, or evict a tenant.

Limited jurisdiction courts

The Traffic Tribunal court handles only traffic tickets and related matters.

Family Court is responsible for domestic relations such as child support in Rhode Island, divorce, custody, and neglect cases, as well as juvenile courts including drug court and truancy courts. Family courts received about 3,000 divorce cases and nearly 2,500 child custody cases in a recent year.

Worker’s Compensation court has jurisdiction over claims of on the job injuries and related payments.

Probate courts are part of the municipal government in the state, with each town having its own probate department. These courts decide the legitimacy of wills and heirs. Anyone can access Rhode Island court records online.

Trial courts

District courts do not conduct jury trials when they hear misdemeanor criminal cases and civil suits in which the value does not exceed $10,000. These Rhode Island courthouses received over 56,000 cases in a recent year, including 22,500 civil cases and 21,600 misdemeanors. You can find Rhode Island Criminal Records through Recordsfinder.com's search tools.

Found in five districts around the state, superior courts have general jurisdiction over criminal and civil cases (the latter when valued above $10,000). Appeals of district and probate court cases are heard here, de novo, which means new trials are held rather than panels of judges reviewing the case.

Information about court records may be searched online by conducting Rhode Island court case lookup. Juvenile case records and those that include the names of victims of certain crimes are kept confidential and not subject to records requests.

In a recent year, superior courts received 13,739 new cases; of those almost 5,000 were felonies and over 8,000 were civil cases.

Appellate court

The state supreme court hears appeals of superior court cases and presides over the state judiciary.

The State Federal court

Each state has at least one branch of federal court, U.S. District Court, which has jurisdiction over violations of federal law, bankruptcies, and lawsuits involving multiple states. Records of these cases may be searched online by performing Rhode Island court record lookup.

Rhode Island Notable Court Cases

In 1786, Trevett v. Weeden., a case regarding paper currency being required to be accepted as legal tender, was one of the first cases to ever determine a legislative act was unconstitutional.

Picard v. Barry Pontiac-Buick, Inc. (1995), was a famous tort case now used in many textbooks as an example of battery. Battery is legally defined as "'offensive or unconsensual touching upon the body."

Angel v. Murray (1974) was the first case to apply UCC reasoning to service contract modification. The court's decision stated that if certain conditions are present, a contract does not always need to be modified. In this case, a contractor was hired to remove trash for a city in 1964 for a period of five years. In 1967, the contract price was increased by $10,000 because of the vast increase in households the contractor was removing refuse for. A lower trial court ordered the extra $10,000 to be paid back because it was not specified in the original contract. However, the Rhode Island Supreme Court determined that the precedent for such a case regarded only goods and not services, so it was determined that the unforeseen increase in refuse removal, although not specified in the still-active contract, was deserving of a higher contract price and the $10,000 additional fee was reasonable for such an increase in work.