How to Find and Cite Arizona Law

A.R.S. § 23-363 carries a parenthetical below its heading, reading: Caution: 1998 Prop. 105 applies. Those few words are your whole warning that the Legislature cannot repeal the section, and can amend it only by a three-fourths roll call of both chambers.

The warning matters because the text beneath it looks ordinary. Arizona's minimum wage section reads like any other wage provision. What makes it different lives in the constitution and in the bill that enacted it.

Where the protection comes from

Article IV, part 1, section 1 of the Arizona Constitution is the initiative and referendum article, and voters amended it in 1998. Subsection (6)(B) strips the Legislature of the power to repeal a voter-approved measure. Subsection (6)(C) allows an amendment only when "the amending legislation furthers the purposes of such measure" and at least three-fourths of the members of each house vote for it by roll call. Subsection (6)(D) does the same for diverting the money such a measure created. Subsection (14) closes the side door, so the Legislature cannot pass some other act that supersedes a protected measure either.

Read the section closely and you will find two tracks running through it. Measures that approve a tax need sixty percent of the votes cast. Everything else needs a majority. The thresholds were split apart by a later amendment, and the article now says each rule twice, once for each track. It is a long read for that reason.

What the drafters are told to do

The Arizona Legislative Bill Drafting Manual has a section on this, and calls it Prop. 105 throughout. It says legislative council staff prepare and update a Proposition 105 Requirements publication, and a drafter must consult it to find out whether a section is covered. That publication exists because you genuinely cannot tell from the statute alone.

A bill touching a protected section has to open that section with fixed language:

Sec. __  Subject to the requirements of article IV, part 1,
section 1, Constitution of Arizona, section X-XXX, Arizona
Revised Statutes, is amended to read:

And it has to carry a closing session law section headed "Requirements for enactment: three-fourths vote." One useful wrinkle: if a bill contains protected sections and ordinary ones, the ordinary ones still pass on a simple majority. So a single act can have two vote thresholds inside it, and only the protected sections carry the higher one.

That is also your research route. When you want to know whether a section is protected, go to the enacting bill and look at its lead-in line.

The forms Arizona uses on itself

Statute            A.R.S. section 1-101
Pinpoint           section 15-957, subsection C, paragraph 2,
                   subdivision (a), item (ii)
Rule               A.A.C. R17-4-301
Chapter of rules   17 A.A.C. 4
Register           7 A.A.R. 1325, March 23, 2001
Session law        Laws 1998, Ch. 196, § 4
Constitution       article IV, part 1, section 2, Constitution of Arizona

A.R.S. § 1-101 authorises the statute form: the abbreviation "A.R.S." followed by the title number and the section number, separated by a dash, and the statute's own example spells out the word section. The rule and register forms come from a regulation, A.A.C. R1-1-409, which the Secretary of State adopted for rule drafting.

Look at what R1-1-409(B) actually does with the short form. For a chapter it writes 17 A.A.C. 4, with the abbreviation in the middle. For a section it writes A.A.C. R17-4-301, with the abbreviation in front. Two orders in one sentence of one rule, and neither matches the citation you would build from a general style guide.

Two more habits are worth copying. Arizona division units go A. for subsection, 1. for paragraph, (a) for subdivision, (i) for item, and the manual says nothing smaller than an item is used. And inside statutory text a drafter may cite neither session law nor administrative rules.

The numbering encodes more than it shows

The digits left of the hyphen in an A.R.S. section are the title number. The first section of a title is usually 101, so title 46 opens at 46-101. When something has to be slotted between two existing sections, Arizona uses decimal hundredths, giving you 46-101.01 and 46-101.02. Those are separate sections, so treat the decimal as part of the address.

Administrative Code numbers work differently, and the brief version you will often hear is that the citation carries title, chapter, article and section. It carries three of those. R1-1-409 sits in Title 1, Chapter 1, Article 4, and the article shows up only as the leading digit of 409. Same with R6-6-1401, which lives in Article 14. The article is real, it organises the chapter, and it never appears as its own field in the cite.

The status problem

Arizona rules expire on their own. Under A.R.S. § 41-1056(G), when the Governor's Regulatory Review Council sets a date for an agency to amend or repeal a rule and the agency misses it, "the rule automatically expires," and the council files a notice of rule expiration with the Secretary of State. Our corpus carries 23,099 Arizona regulation sections, and 1,552 of them are marked expired. A further 4,463 are reserved, meaning the number is held open with no text behind it. If you are matching rule numbers programmatically, that reserved block will look like law and say nothing.

On the statute side, read the disclaimer on the Legislature's own A.R.S. pages. It says the online version "is primarily maintained for legislative drafting purposes and reflects the version of law that is effective on January 1st of the year following the most recent legislative session." The compilation is refreshed once per session. So the free copy is a forward-dated drafting copy, and mid-session enactments are simply absent from it. How many people quoting an azleg URL have checked which January the text is keyed to?

Five minutes you can repeat

Pick a section. Check the heading for a caution line about Prop. 105. Then find the measure that created it, pull the enacting bill, and read whether its lead-in line names article IV, part 1, section 1. For a rule, take the R number, confirm the supplement it was last published in, and check whether a notice of expiration has been filed against the chapter. New rules become effective sixty days after filing with the Secretary of State under A.R.S. § 41-1032, so a rule filed last month is not yet operating.

What will bite you

A client asks whether Arizona can raise its minimum wage threshold by statute. The answer turns on a parenthetical you would have scrolled past, then on a constitutional subsection written twice, then on a roll call. None of that is visible in the operative text of § 23-363. Read the caution line first, every time.

Facts used

All Arizona corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.