The Alaska Court System's own website says a memorandum opinion may not be cited in the courts of the state. Appellate Rule 214(d), the rule that page points to, freely permits citing an unpublished decision to establish res judicata, estoppel, or the law of the case.
So read the rule before you strike one from a brief. Rule 214(d) was added by Supreme Court Order 1654 effective April 15, 2008 and amended by SCO 1972 effective October 15, 2021. It also lets you cite an unpublished decision for persuasive value when no published opinion would serve as well, provided you flag it as unpublished in a parenthetical and say where the reader can find it. If the decision is not in a public database, you file a copy with the brief.
Who publishes what
The Legislature's site carries the Alaska Statutes from 1993 forward and the whole Alaska Administrative Code. The print statutes run to thirteen volumes, come out every other year in October, and get an annual interim supplement in between. Volume 1 holds the constitution. Volume 11 holds the governor's executive orders, which is the last place most people look.
Regulations are a separate operation entirely. The Department of Law publishes a Drafting Manual for Administrative Regulations under AS 44.62.050, and under AS 44.62.060 every agency with rulemaking power has to follow it. The Office of the Lieutenant Governor does the filing and writes in the effective date and the register number. The code is refreshed quarterly.
Appellate decisions have no Alaska-published set at all. The court calls the Pacific Reporter the official reporter of Alaska appellate decisions, and a slip opinion is taken down from the court's website once it appears there.
The forms Alaska uses on itself
Statute AS 08.66.015 (title 8, chapter 66, section 15)
Regulation 6 AAC 65.990 (title 6, chapter 65, section 990)
Session law sec. 34, ch. 5, SLA 2015
Constitution Art. X, sec. 6, Ak Const.
AS 01.05.011 is where the statute form comes from. It says the compilation is known as the Alaska Statutes and "may be cited 'AS' followed by the number of the title, chapter, and section, separated by periods," and it gives itself as the worked example.
Two things catch people. The first is padding. Titles run to two digits and sections to three, so the zeros in AS 01.05.011 and AS 08.66.015 are load-bearing string characters that a tidy-minded parser will happily eat. The court library glosses AS 08.66.015 as section 15, so the human reading and the machine reading come apart right there.
The second is the constitution. Alaska's regulation drafters write Art. X, sec. 6, Ak Const., with the state cut to two letters and moved to the end. In a brief or a treatise you will see Alaska Const. art. X, § 6. Same provision, two spellings, and the short one is what turns up in the Authority line of a rule.
One more piece of housekeeping. AS 01.05.006 says the headings, the notes, and the old citations to Alaska Compiled Laws Annotated printed around the text carry no force of law. Only the text does.
Dating a regulation
Every AAC section closes with a history note and then an Authority line. A real one looks like this:
(Eff. 11/12/60, Register 20; am 6/8/66, Register 32; am 7/30/2001, Register 154)
Authority: AS 28.60.070 AS 28.60.080
The register number is the unit that tells you which quarterly compilation you are holding. Dates alone will not do it. "am" means amended, and a repeal gets its own date in the same string.
The Authority line is the other half of the check. A rule has force only if the agency had the statutory power to make it, so the statutes named there are worth opening. The manual allows the Alaska Constitution as an authority in rare cases and only after the Department of Law agrees, set out as Art. II, sec. 1, Ak Const. A session law can be the authority only when the power sits in temporary law with no codified address.
Statutes date themselves in a different dialect. A section history reads like this:
(§ 1 ch 1 SLA 1963; am § 1 ch 127 SLA 1974; am § 1 ch 168 SLA 1990)
No period after ch, and SLA stands for Session Laws of Alaska. That string is the whole amendment record for the section.
A check you can repeat
Take 6 AAC 65.990. Open the chapter on the Legislature's site, read the history note back to its earliest register, then open each AS section on the Authority line and confirm it is still in force. Then look at the Online Public Notice site, where proposed and adopted regulations are posted, for anything filed since that register closed. Four steps, about five minutes, and it catches the rule that was amended after the quarter you are reading.
Alaska's regulations move a lot. Our corpus carries 25,717 Alaska regulation sections, and 8,011 of them are marked repealed. Would you have guessed a third?
What will bite you
Rule 106 is the quiet one. If the supreme court divides evenly on a point, the point is affirmed for that appeal and has no precedential effect. If only three of the five justices sit and the point goes two to one, same answer. A published Alaska decision can read like authority and do nothing for you, and the opinion will say so if you read the vote.
Then there is local law. Article X, section 3 of the constitution says "The entire State shall be divided into boroughs, organized or unorganized." Section 6 leaves the unorganized borough to the Legislature, which "may exercise any power or function in an unorganized borough which the assembly may exercise in an organized borough." Across a large share of the state, the question "what does the local code say" has no local answer. State law is the local law, and there is no municipal clerk to call.
Facts used
All Alaska corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data.
| Claim | Value | Where from |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska sections held | 45,590 | Corpus count |
| Regulation sections (AAC) | 25,717 | Corpus count |
| AAC sections marked repealed | 8,011 | Corpus count |
| Statute sections (AS) | 17,935 | Corpus count |
| Court rules sections | 763 | Corpus count |
| Constitution sections | 245 | Corpus count |
| Citing unpublished decisions | Alaska R. App. P. 214(d), SCO 1654 (2008), SCO 1972 (2021) | Alaska Rules of Appellate Procedure |
| No precedential effect on a tie or a 2-1 panel | Alaska R. App. P. 106 | Alaska Rules of Appellate Procedure |
| "AS" citation form | AS 01.05.011 | Alaska Statutes |
| Headings and notes are not law | AS 01.05.006 | Alaska Statutes |
| AAC organisation, history note, Authority line, Ak Const. form | Drafting Manual for Administrative Regulations, 2025 (24th ed.) | Alaska Department of Law |
| Drafting manual published and binding | AS 44.62.050, AS 44.62.060 | Alaska Statutes |
| AS and AAC citation examples, print schedule | Legal Resources - Alaska | Alaska Court System law library |
| Official reporter of Alaska appellate decisions | Pacific Reporter | Alaska Court System |
| Boroughs and the unorganized borough | Alaska Const. art. X, §§ 3, 6 | Alaska Constitution |
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Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.