Every state has a set of compiled laws or statutes. Each state organizes their statutes differently, but the same basic principles apply. Every law must go through the legislative process, is first published as a session law, and then codified and arranged by subject. States have different names for their statutes such as:
The Oklahoma Statutes are reprinted every ten years and updated with annual supplements. The Law Library maintains a copy of the official Oklahoma Statutes.
The Chickasaw Nation Law Library at Oklahoma City University keeps and maintains statutes from a select number of states. Those states include:
Each state publishes an official version of its statutes. These sets generally do not contain annotations and are updated with annual supplements. Publishers such as Thomson Reuters and Lexis separately publish annotated versions of the state statutes. The annotated versions are available in print and electronically. Before searching for state statutes in the commercial databases, consult the Bluebook T1: Table of Jurisdictions. The Bluebook will provide you with the names of the state statute compilations as well as citation information for the official version.
At the end of the legislative session, the laws passed are collected and published chronologically in order of enactment. These are called session laws.
If looking for the session law, it is helpful to know when the statute was enacted and the bill number.
Oklahoma session laws in print are located in the Law Library.
Oklahoma session laws from 1998-current can be found through OSCN.
State session laws for Oklahoma and other states can be found on Westlaw, Lexis Advance, and HeinOnline. HeinOnline has a Session Laws Library that has session laws for all 50 states from the very first legislative session in each state.
