A legal citation is a reference to a legal authority where particular information, such as a case or statute, can be located. Legal citations are often confusing to the uninitiated because they differ from references used in other types of research. Statute citations are generally comprised of two or three parts.
Some statutes appear in several different codes.
You only need to look at one of the three available versions of the federal code because each reports the same federal legislation. Unofficial, privately published versions of federal and state statutes are generally preferred by legal researchers because they are published much more quickly than their official counterparts, and they often include more research aids than the official publications. The most frequently requested statutory codes are listed in alphabetical order by abbreviation in the table below. The other States' statutory codifications are located in each state's particular collection on the First Level of the Law Library, Northern range.