State Statutes Indexes in the United States
Organization of Statutes:
- Some states organize their statutes into codes according to subject, like California and New York.
- In other states, statutes are collected into annotated volumes organized by title number or by “chapter.”
- In other states, the statutes are simply numbered sequentially without regard to their subject matter and published in collections.
Example of Topical Arrangement of State Statutes
Click any of the letters:
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | W | X | Y | Z
State Statute Indexes
Pg. 6-24 of the book “In Legal Research, How to Find and Understand the Law”, by Stephen Elias and Susan Levinkind, provide a good introduction about state statutes indexes for legal research:
“Many collections of state statutes have indexes for each subject (that is, for each title, code or chapter) and for the collection of laws as a whole. In California, a separate index called Larmac, published by Lexis Publishing, also provides a detailed subject index to California statutes.
If your state’s statutes are found in two or more publications, feel free to use either index. For example, the California statutes are published both in West’s Annotated Codes and in Deering’s Annotated Codes (Lexis Publishing).
If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the West index, use the Deering index. Since both publications index the same statutes and use the same citations, a citation you find in the Deering index can be looked up in the Westcode, and vice versa.”
State Statute Citations
Citations to state statutes in general refer to the volume or title (the first number of the citation), and after the section numbers. In the states that have codes, like New York and
California, citations show the name of the Code or, as in New York, the Law name, followed by the section number.
More about citing statutory provisions:
- citing to a statute revision.
- citing a sessional volume.
Statutes and Law
Searching Statutes
Statutory Construction
Statutory construction is useful to interpreting state statutes. See enactment for more information.
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