Archived Statutes and Regulations (11/09)
Many times it is necessary to look at a statute or regulation as it existed in some prior year. The easiest way to do this is to look at an archived version of the statute or regulation. LexisNexis® has archived versions of the United States Code Service, the Code of Federal Regulations, state statutes, and state administrative codes. The coverage of the archived statutes and regulations varies by source, so you need to check online to see how far back the coverage goes.
While archived versions of statutes and regulations are available online, they are not available via Get a Document. You need to run a search to retrieve an archived code section. To retrieve 26 U.S.C.S. § 401 from 1994, you would choose the following source:
Federal Legal - U.S. > Find Statutes, Regulations, Administrative Materials & Court Rules > United States Code Service (USCS) Materials > United States Code Service Materials (Archived) > USCS, 1994
Use the CITE segment to retrieve the statute. The following search retrieves the proper section:
cite(26 and 401)
The path for the Code of Federal Regulations 1994 archive is the following:
Federal Legal - U.S. > Find Statutes, Regulations, Administrative Materials & Court Rules > Archived Code of Federal Regulations > CFR, 1994
The search for an archived version of a Code of Federal Regulations section is the same as for the United States Code Service. You use the CITE segment and the title and the section number of the regulation. For instance, the following search will retrieve 26 C.F.R. § 1.301-1:
cite(26 and 1.301-1)
LexisNexis has archives for the Code of Federal Regulations from 1981. The archives for the United States Code Service go back to 1992.
Archives for state statutes can be found using similar techniques. The path for the 1994 version of the California statutes is the following:
States Legal - U.S. > California > Find Statutes, Regulations, Administrative Materials & Court Rules > By Statutes & Regulations > Legislative Archive > CA - Deering's California Codes Annotated, 1994
The path for archives from other states is the same as for California except for the name of the state. The search string may need to be varied slightly from the searches given above due to the citation method of the various state statutes. For instance, in California, statutes do not have a title number, but rather are named. There is a Civil Code, Penal Code, etc. The following search will retrieve California Civil Code § 301:
cite(civ! and 301)
Archived versions of the state administrative codes can be found using the following path:
States Legal - U.S. > California > Find Statutes, Regulations, Administrative Materials & Court Rules > By Statutes & Regulations > Administrative Code Archive > CA - California Administrative Code Archive 2008
For additional information on searching archived statutes and regulations as well as segment searching, visit the LexisNexis Support Center.
