Finding a Statute or Regulation  Tags: law courses lrw4  

If you have a citation, you can use it to locate the statute in the library.   Federal and state statutes are cited using the same basic pattern, with a few differences.  The elements of a federal statute are:

The elements of an Illinois statute are:

In our library, statutes can be found in the following locations:

• Federal codes [U.S.C./U.S.C.A./U.S.C.S.]: 7th and 9th floors (KF 62)
• Illinois Compiled Statutes [ILCS/Ill. Comp. Stat./Ill. Comp. Stat. Ann.]: 9th floor Reference and 10th floor Illinois Reserve (KFI 1230)
• Illinois Revised Statutes (Ill. Rev. Stat.): 10th floor lllinois Reserve (KFI 1230)
• State statutes (except Illinois): 6th floor (KFA-KFW)

If you do not have a citation, but know a statute's commonly-used name and its jurisdiction, you can use the Popular Names Table to find a statute.  The Table can usually be found at the end of each set of statutes.  If you are looking for a newer statute, be sure to check the supplements as well.

For example, if you were looking for the Clean Air Act, you could look in the Popular Names Table of the U.S. Code, the U.S.C.A., or the U.S.C.S.  All would look similar to this entry in the U.S. Code's Popular Names Table:

Now you know you can find the statute in Title 42, Section 7401 of the U.S. Code.

Note: if you are looking for newer legislation, it would be better to look at the Popular Names Table in a commercially-published set (i.e., U.S.C.A. or U.S.C.S., as opposed to U.S.C.).  The official U.S. Code takes years to publish, and is therefore much more out-of-date than the the other sets (which are updated frequently with pocket parts.)

Always make sure that you have the most current information by checking the pocket parts and cumulative supplements of your volumes. 

If you are looking for a statute by topic, you should start with the Indexes for your jurisdiction's statutes.  Each set of statutes includes an Index at the end of the set. 

For example, if you wanted to find out if there was any federal legislation governing the conservation of polar bears, you could look up "Polar Bears" in the index.  The example at the right is from the U.S.C.S. General Index.

After each subtopic, the title and section where the statute can be found in the U.S. Code is listed.  Using this information, you can find the section in the main volumes of the U.S. Code.  

Note: It is usually better to use the indexes of commercially-published, annotated statute sets (i.e., U.S.C.A. or U.S.C.S., as opposed to the U.S.C.) because they are more extensively indexed, and also more up-to-date than the official versions.

Always make sure that you have the most current information by checking the pocket parts and cumulative supplements of your volumes. 

If you run across an abbreviation not listed to the left, consult Bieber's Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, located in the 9th Floor Reference collection.

The Bluebook & ALWD Citation Manual are also useful sources for determining citations of state statutes.  They may be borrowed from the Circulation Desk for a period of 3 hours.