How to Find and Cite Hawaii Law

Hawaiʻi is spelled with a glottal stop, and the mark is not an apostrophe. The Judiciary tells its appellate clerks to keep that character in citations to official publications, the Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes among them, and to set it in a different typeface from every other letter on the page.

Hawaiian is an official language of the state under Haw. Const. art. XV, § 4, which is why the mark counts as a letter and not a flourish. It also means the name of Hawaii's statute book is in circulation under two spellings, and your search box is probably holding one of them.

Statutes in one building, rules scattered

The Legislature runs the Hawaii Revised Statutes online, chapter by chapter, at capitol.hawaii.gov. The Legislative Reference Bureau's Revision of Statutes Division does the codifying. It puts out the Session Laws each year with an annual supplement to the statutes, and replaces bound volumes as they need replacing. That side is straightforward.

Administrative rules are a different building, and nobody lives in the lobby.

Under HRS § 91-4 an agency files certified copies of a rule with the Lieutenant Governor once the Governor has approved it, and the Lieutenant Governor keeps a permanent register of rules open to public inspection. The rule takes effect ten days after that filing unless it names a later date. A register is a filing office. It is not a website.

The Lieutenant Governor's administrative rules page is a table of departments, and every row links out to that department's own site. The page carries a disclaimer telling you that you are leaving and that the office is not responsible for the content or the accuracy of wherever you land.

The Legislative Reference Bureau does publish two things worth having. A Directory of Administrative Rules, which lists the chapters each department has adopted or repealed. And a Table of Statutory Sections Implemented, which tells you at a glance whether agencies have written rules under a given statute. Neither one is the rule text.

So you read Hawaii Administrative Rules department by department. Title 11 is Health. Title 13 is Land and Natural Resources. Title 16 is Commerce and Consumer Affairs. The title number names the department, which stays tidy right up until a department gets renamed or split.

What a Hawaii cite looks like

Statutes go HRS § 480-2. Chapter 480, section 2, the unfair competition and deceptive practices section. Write HRS, not Haw. Rev. Stat. The Judiciary's citation handbook says so outright, and notes that the instruction runs contrary to the Bluebook.

That handbook also wants a year in parentheses on first use, naming the bound volume or the supplement you read the text in. Hawaii replaced its whole set in 1976, 1985 and 1993, then switched to swapping volumes one at a time. Which means different volumes carry different years and there is no single date that covers the code.

Rules go HAR § 11-46-3. Title 11, chapter 46, section 3. Health, community noise control, classification of zoning districts. Chapter 46 is a PDF on the Department of Health's server and the sections inside it run from 11-46-1 to 11-46-22.

The rules carry something the statute pages do not. Sections end with a bracketed effective date, then an Auth note and an Imp note listing the HRS sections that authorize the rule and the ones it implements. For chapter 46 both point at HRS §§ 342F-3 and 342F-31. That is your route back from rule to statute, printed inside the rule.

Two thirds of the guidance has run out

Hawaii has 27,121 regulation sections. 15,689 read as in force, 1,143 as repealed and 1,222 as reserved. Another 9,066 carry no status marker anyone can read, a third of the whole set. When rules live as PDFs on one department server after another, a repealed chapter tends to be a file somebody replaced rather than a page somebody marked.

The sharper number is much smaller. Hawaii has 171 state agency guidance documents. 113 of them are expired and 58 are in force.

None are repealed. Not one.

Expired and repealed are different events. Repealed means somebody decided to end it. Expired means nobody had to, because the document named its own end date, or the authority under it ran out, and then the date went by.

Hawaii's rulemaking statute has the same habit built in. An emergency rule adopted under HRS § 91-3(b) is good for no longer than 120 days without renewal. One adopted under § 91-3(c), the kind used when new federal legislation or a court decision disrupts prior practice, runs only until the next regular session adjourns sine die.

So when you open one of these, are you reading live policy or a souvenir? The face of the document may not tell you.

Try this on one section

Open HRS § 480-2. Subsection (a) is a single sentence saying unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts in trade or commerce are unlawful.

Now read the square brackets at the end. L 1965, c 129, then amendments in 1987, 1988 and 2002. Session law history, printed right there under the text, which also tells you the last year anything in that section moved.

Then make the trip on the rules side. HAR § 11-46-3, to the Department of Health PDF, to the Auth note, to HRS § 342F-3. Three hops, no index in between, and the first and the last sit on different state servers.

Small things that ruin a lookup

Department URLs. Rules that live on a department's own server move when the department reorganizes its site. A chapter that was a working link last year can be a dead one this year while the rule is still perfectly good law.

What the statute actually points at. HRS § 91-4 talks about certified copies in a register at the Lieutenant Governor's office. It says nothing about a PDF. If a filed rule and a posted PDF ever disagree, only one of the two is the thing that section describes.

Guidance with no end marker on the outside. The 113 expired documents look exactly like the 58 live ones until you read the date inside.

Facts used

All Hawaii corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data, measured 2026-09-18.

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.