Finding Session Law Chapters
Sep 20
The General and Special Laws of Texas, often referred to as the "session laws," constitute a complete set of all bills passed into law by each session of the Texas legislature. The Secretary of State assigns each passed Act a chapter number. Following each legislative session, the Acts are arranged in chapter-number order and published as a bound set.
Session law chapter numbers are included in session law citations, which are listed after each section of code in the Texas statutes as a means to track the legislative history of a statute.
For example, Texas Government Code, Sec. 405.014. Acts of the Legislature, includes the following session law citations:
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| Note: For a thorough legislative history of a Texas statute, see the bound volumes of Vernon's Texas Codes and Statutes Annotated, which are available in the LRL's collection. |
87th Legislative Session
The Secretary of State's Bills and Resolutions webpage lists the session law chapter assigned to each bill that is enacted into law.
For example, when looking at the list of House Bills from the 87th Regular Session, the first column with the heading "Bill," lists the bill numbers. The second column with the heading "Chapter," contains the corresponding chapter number.
For questions about bill/chapter numbers for bills from the 87th Regular Session, please contact the Secretary of State's office at (512) 463-5561.
1st — 87th Legislative Sessions
Session law chapter numbers for previous sessions are available online through the Legislative Archive System on the LRL's website.
To view the complete bill/session law chapter cross reference table for a session, use the "Search by session law chapter" option.
Select a legislative session in the drop-down menu and leave the chapter box blank, then click on "Search by chapter."
For example, the bill/chapter cross reference table for the 87th Regular Session lists the session law chapters, the corresponding bills, and the bill captions or bill subjects.
