The session laws are the bills passed by the House and Senate during the legislative session. Session laws are helpful in tracking what language was changed, added, or removed from a statute. Depending on your goal, you will likely need to consult with the session law for each year indicated in the history of the statute.
A bill number is located at the beginning of the session law. The bill number will be needed to track down additional legislative history.
The effective date can be found at the end. Typically that is January 1 of the year following the legislative session; however the legislature may declare a different effective date, or declare an emergency, in which case the act becomes effective immediately upon passage.
[2015 c.525 §2; 2017 c.207 §1]
In this example, we will look at the 2017 session laws.
Notice that the bill number is located near the top: HB 2482
Section 1 (a), in the green box, is entirely in bold indicating it is a new language.
Near the bottom, in the red box, language is italicized in brackets indicating deleted language.
The effective date at the end shows that it went into effect January 1, 2018.
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