The Mississippi capitol building.
Ask most Americans to name a law that governs them and they reach for something federal. But the Constitution enumerates a limited set of federal powers and the Tenth Amendment reserves the rest to the states. This means that the law shaping an ordinary day is almost entirely state law. The speed limit on your commute and the condition of the road itself. The sales tax on your coffee. Your driver's license, your marriage, your landlord's claim on your deposit, and your employer's ability to fire you without a reason all fall under state law. And one almost nobody considers until it's too late: if you die without a will, a state statute instead of your family decides who inherits and in what shares. Intestate succession is invisible right up until it governs everything you leave behind.
But going back to Federal law for a moment, its remarkably open. The United States Statutes at Large, which is every act of Congress in chronological order organized by volume, is available free on GovInfo in PDF going all the way back to volume one in 1789 when the First Congress drafted the Bill of Rights. You can download every volume. The United States Code is closer to a finding aid with the actual laws in the Statutes at Large being what controls. But it too is free online. This openness was a principle before it was a technology. James Madison, the main drafter of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, warned in Federalist No. 62 that it would be "of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." Later he was blunter: a popular government without popular information is "but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy."
In America, there are Constitutional bans on local legislation, which are often referred to as special laws that focus on one city or one group. To get around these bans, legislatures produced workarounds. One is by using population brackets instead of naming a county. This involves writing a statute applying to every county with a population between 47,200 and 47,500. This, of course, would narrow it to impact exactly one county, and everyone in the chamber knows which one. Courts across the country have spent a century deciding when a classification is a real general rule and when it's a single county getting a special law.
States differ from one another far more than people realize. Although they have mostly the same contours a legislature, a governor, and courts, they have their own unique identities and laws. The states are composed of fifty constitutions, fifty legislatures, fifty publication schemes, and no obligation to resemble each other. But the case for accessible law was never weaker at the state level. If anything it was stronger, because state law is what people actually collide with. Madison's complaint in Federalist 62 grew out of watching the Virginia legislature, not Congress. Jefferson spent three years on the Revisal of the Laws of Virginia on the premise that a citizen ought to be able to find the rules. William Blackstone, who had some influence on the minds of some founders through his popular work Commentaries on the Laws of England, had already insisted that a law confined to the breast of the legislator and never promulgated was no law at all. And as recently as 2020, the Supreme Court held in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org that a state cannot copyright the annotations to its own official code. That principle is now colliding with the practical reality that the citizens of the states are increasingly having to pay to access their laws.
Simply learning what your state's law says has gotten harder, and the retreat began with print. Administrative codes and registers went first. Florida made the online version of its Administrative Code the official one in 2012; Wisconsin ended widespread government printing of its Administrative Code in 2015. A 2010 Connecticut legislative survey found seventeen states with paperless initiatives, three publishing statutes online only. And not one with an established authentication policy for the electronic files replacing print. Libraries then stopped collecting what states stopped printing. Georgetown now warns its journal staff that interlibrary loan is unreliable for state registers, because too few libraries carry them and surviving runs are incomplete. Mississippi still prints its General Laws, but distribution runs to named state officers, the public universities, and one copy per county delivered to the sheriff. Eighty-two counties, one volume each. But at least you have the internet, right?
Section 1-5-7 of the Mississippi Code directs the Secretary of State to send the General Laws to the governor, the constitutional officers, the public universities and to the sheriff of each county, for the county law library. Eighty-two sheriffs receive one volume of the session laws each, which is the way enacted Mississippi law physically reaches the counties it governs.
Except online access is often paywalled or reduced to a search box, which is often having the same effect as not being available online at all. A search box returns scattershot fragments across separate pages and presumes you already know the term to type. You cannot browse. That matters more than it sounds because much legal research happens by reading titles. For instance, scanning a chapter's contents is one of the main ways of recognizing that a section you would never have thought to search for is precisely the one governing your problem. Serendipity is a research method. GovInfo lets you download a whole Statutes at Large volume and page through it. But most states offer nothing comparable for their session laws. Hosting PDFs is cheap. And you don't even need PDFs since you can create HTML websites using simple text. Every state already has the files. The gap in access is a choice, not a constraint.
So who wins? LexisNexis publishes Mississippi's official code under contract with Thomson Reuters holding that position elsewhere. HeinOnline sells exact replicas of the bound session laws of all fifty states, including territorial and early statehood volumes. The digitization is finished. But it's treated as a product instead of a public document created with taxpayer funds. In effect, you're often paying twice. Note also the distinction that gets blurred since a code is mostly a topical rearrangement. And in Mississippi it is only evidence of the law, outranked by the session laws and the enrolled bill. Regardless, almost every layer of law sits behind a paywall. Lawyers benefit too since research cost is billable and the paywall is a barrier against pro se opponents (pro se--Latin meaning one self--describes individuals who represent themselves in court cases). Another winner in this reality are standards bodies like the International Code Council (ICC) and National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), whose building and fire codes often carry the force of law and are sold as copyrighted products. And finally the legislatures themselves benefit because law nobody can find is law nobody can challenge.
