How to Find and Cite Florida Law

Only a public official can ask Florida's attorney general a legal question. Private citizens are shut out, and even so the office has built up 20,949 published advisory opinions.

That is the largest attorney general opinion collection of any state in this data set, close to twice the next one. It also sits oddly against the Florida Statutes, which run to 25,020 sections. Nearly one opinion for every section of statutory law in the state. (Counts measured 2026-09-18.)

Section 16.01(3) explains the volume. The attorney general shall answer a written requisition from the Governor, a Cabinet member, the head of an executive department, the Speaker, the Senate President or either minority leader. The office may answer one from a legislator, another state officer, or an officer of a county, city, other local unit or political subdivision. Either way the question has to relate to that officer's own duties. Private individuals and companies don't qualify, and routing a request through a friendly official doesn't fix that.

So the file reads as a running record of what Florida's public officers needed settled, question by question, for a very long time. The office's own opinion indexes reach back to 1895. Set it against the rest of Florida's non-statutory material, 943 court rule sections, 217 constitution sections and 100 agency guidance documents, and the opinions swamp all of it put together.

They carry weight, though not the kind you might assume. Florida attorney general opinions are persuasive authority, not binding, and a court is free to disagree with one.

The citation forms are set by a rule

Florida doesn't leave citation to habit. Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.800 is a uniform citation system, and it covers most of what you'll reach for.

A statute looks like § 48.031, Fla. Stat. (2014). Section symbol, then the number, then Fla. Stat., then the edition year in parentheses. When the text you need sits in a supplement, that gets marked too, as in § 120.54, Fla. Stat. (Supp. 1998). A session law looks like Ch. 74-177, § 5, Laws of Fla. A rule looks like Fla. Admin. Code R. 62D-2.014. An attorney general opinion looks like Op. Att'y Gen. Fla. 73-178 (1973). Anything 9.800 doesn't cover falls to the Bluebook, and after that to the Florida Style Manual.

The year in a statute cite is doing real work. Florida republishes its statutes every year. The Division of Law Revision, inside the Office of Legislative Services, drafts an adoption act each session. That act adopts the Florida Statutes going forward and names what counts as the official statutory law of the state. Drop the year and you've cited an idea rather than a text.

Why the statute book looks clean

Florida's statute corpus holds 25,020 sections and every one of them is marked in force. That follows from how the state maintains the book.

The Division of Law Revision can run a reviser's bill each session. A reviser's bill makes grammatical, editorial and technical corrections. It can also pull obsolete, inconsistent, redundant, invalid or superseded statutes out of the official statutes altogether. So Florida sweeps. A dead Florida section tends to leave rather than sit in place wearing a label.

Numbering is chapter, then a dot, then the section, spread across 49 titles. 768.28 is chapter 768, section 28, the waiver of sovereign immunity in tort actions. The part after the dot behaves like a decimal, because that's how Florida squeezes new law in between old law. 768.0415 sits between 768.041 and 768.042. 768.128 sits between 768.1257 and 768.13. Sort those as integers and you'll shuffle the chapter into nonsense.

The regulations don't sweep

The Florida Administrative Code is the other half of the picture, and it keeps everything.

The Department of State compiles and publishes it electronically under section 120.55, and that electronic version is the official compilation. Every rule carries the grant of rulemaking authority it was adopted under, the specific law implemented, and a history note.

Of 28,890 F.A.C. sections in the corpus, 16,688 are in force. 8,147 are repealed, 2,533 are superseded and 1,522 were transferred to a different number. Add the three and you get 12,202 sections, roughly 42 percent of the code, that aren't operating law today.

The transferred group is the one that misleads people, because a transferred rule isn't dead. The text may still govern. It just answers to a different number now.

One history note, read slowly

Take Fla. Admin. Code R. 62-4.070, Standards for Issuing or Denying Permits. Its history note reads:

New 5-17-72, Amended 7-8-82, 2-1-83, 12-3-84, Formerly 17-4.07, Amended 8-31-88, 3-28-91, Formerly 17-4.070.

Read that left to right. The rule was born in 1972 as 17-4.07. After the 1984 amendment it became 17-4.070, the same rule with a padded section number. After the 1991 amendment it became 62-4.070, because Florida merged its environmental regulation and natural resources agencies into the Department of Environmental Protection and moved chapter 17 rules over to chapter 62.

Three numbers, one rule, and none of the old ones was wrong for its era. So what does your tooling do with 17-4.07? Match it as a string and it never meets 17-4.070, so a brief from 1985 and a brief from 1992 look like they cite different rules. Round-trip it through a number type instead and the trailing zero vanishes, which turns a good Florida rule number into one the state's own search won't take.

Three habits worth keeping

The history note is the status. Pull an F.A.C. rule without it and you have text with no date and no fate attached to it.

A transferred number isn't a dead end. Follow the Formerly chain forward and you'll usually land on live law under a newer prefix.

Don't mistake a bill for a statute. In 2026 the Florida Legislature passed HB 145, which would have raised the recovery limits in section 768.28. It cleared the House 108 to 1 and the Senate 36 to 0. The Governor vetoed it on June 30, 2026, so the limits in the statute today are the ones that were sitting there before the session started. Quite a lot of commentary from that spring reads as though the change went through.

Facts used

All counts come from the Florida corpus in Vaquill AI's US primary law data, measured 2026-09-18, across 76,119 Florida sections.

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.