Session
laws are the laws passed by a session of a state’s legislature. Legislative sessions
can be annual, biennial, special, extra—however often the state legislature
decides to meet. Eventually the session laws end up under the appropriate topic
(such as “Criminal Law” or “Motor Vehicles”) in a state’s statutes or code, but
until then they can be found only by their session law number. In North
Carolina that number looks like this: S.L. 2017-7, where “S.L.” (or sometimes
“SL”) stands for session law, “2017” is the year the legislature passed the
law, and “7” represents the seventh law passed in that year of the legislative
session. S.L. 2017-8 would be the eighth law passed in 2017. And so on.
Before
North Carolina session laws are available in print, they can be found online at
the North Carolina General Assembly page: https://www.ncleg.net/. Click on
“Session Laws” underneath the Shortcuts list on the far right of the North
Carolina General Assembly home page and that will take you to the most recent
laws passed in North Carolina’s legislature. These laws will be listed by
session law number, and you will have a choice of clicking on the link to the
bill (begun in the state House or Senate) that initiated the law, or to an
HTML, RTF, or PDF copy of the law itself.
North
Carolina session laws are published in print two ways. They’ll first appear in red
or pale green pamphlet form at the end of the set of North Carolina General
Statutes. The red pamphlets are the Advance Legislative Service and contain the
session laws themselves. The pale green pamphlets are the Advance Annotation
Service and include any annotations (that is, case notes) about the new laws.
The
second way North Carolina session laws are published is in book form, usually
containing a whole legislative session. These books are located on the 4th floor of the law library, but you can see examples of them online, at the North
Carolina General Assembly session laws page: https://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/EnactedLegislation/ELTOC.pl?sType=Law.
Click on “Session Laws 2001–2017 (as published in the bound Session Law
volumes)” and you will be taken to a page that has PDFs of several years of
North Carolina’s session law volumes.
If you are interested in
finding session laws in other states, HeinOnline has a great database called
Session Laws Library that includes the session laws of all 50 states, the
District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the
Virgin Islands. In some cases, North Carolina being one of them, session laws on
this database go back to the period the state was just a colony, long before
the Revolutionary War, Articles of Confederation, and U.S. Constitution.
Posted by Nick Sexton on Thu. November 1, 2018 12:29 PM
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