Rhode Island in the United States
Legal Materials
Internet links to Rhode Island government agencies statutes, regulations, cases, etc. are posted by FindLaw and WashLaw. Primary legal materials are also available from Lexis, Westlaw and LOIS. Google Scholar has free cases back to 1950; subscription sites Versuslaw and Fastcase also have cases back to 1950.
Supreme Court cases are published in West’s Atlantic Reporter, going back to 1885; they were published in Rhode Island Reports from 1829 to 1980.
To check on the status of a pending bill, call the Legislative Data Systems at 401-751-8833 (out of state) or 800-547-8880 (in state). For questions about recent legislation, try calling the Rhode Island State Law Library (401-222-3275).
Regulations are posted free by the Secretary of State.
West publishes Robert Kent’s Rhode Island Practice.
Subscribers can get historical session laws (1776-1836) from the Digital Session Laws collection on HeinOnline.
Questions, copies and ILL:For questions about Rhode Island legal materials, copies and/or inter-library loan, try calling the Rhode Island State Law Library (401-222-3275) or the Roger Williams University School of Law library (401-254-4530).
Business Entities: You can locate corporate records for Rhode Island business entities using the online database posted by the Secretary of State’s office. The database has records for business corporations, professional service corporations, nonprofit corporations, limited partnerships, limited liability partnerships, limited liability companies, and producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives.
For older companies not included in the database, call the Secretary of State’s Corporate Division (401-222-3040). They have older records on cards, and they can then request to have files pulled from a records center.
For certificates of incorporation, amendments and name changes filed prior to 1960, you can also contact the Rhode Island State Archives (401-222-2353; statearchives@sos.ri.gov). The Archives has an index of companies going up to 1942, so you may want to call them first for help identifying older companies, especially if the company name has changed. It may also be quicker to get records from the Archives, since they don’t have to retrieve the file from a records center.
Note: We linked the resources to archive.org in an effort to decrease the number of broken links cited.
Primary Law
For more U.S. state primary law resources, see:
- U.S. State Law: Constitutional
- U.S. State Cases
- U.S. State Law: Judicial Rules
- U.S. State Law: Codes
- U.S. State Law: Statutes
- U.S. State Legislative: Bills
- U.S. State Law: Executive & Administrative
- U.S. State Law: Municipal
Topics Covered by the Rhode Island Legal Encyclopedia
Note: More detailed information about this State is provided in the Rhode Island jurisdictional legal Encyclopedia, which tie together Rhode Island statutory and case law.
Topics include:
- Rhode Island Statutes
- RI Cases & Case Law
- Rhode Island Legal Websites
- RI State Government Info
- Rhode Island Counties
- Rhode Island Cities
- Rhode Island Legislation
- RI Court Reporters/Depositions
- Rhode Island Legal Forms
- Rhode Island Courts
- RI State Bar/Legal Associations
- Rhode Island Law Enforcement
- Rhode Island Media Sources
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