How to Find and Cite Indiana Law

One line of the Indiana Code tells you how to write a cite to the Indiana Code. IC 1-1-1-1 is headed Citation, and the entire section reads: the Indiana Code may be cited as "IC". Then you file in an Indiana appellate court, where the rule on citation form asks for a different string.

Appellate Rule 22(B) sets the format for Indiana statutes, administrative materials and court rules. Its first row is Ind. Code § 34-1-1-1 (20xx) on a first reference and I.C. § 34-1-1-1 after that. So a brief carries a section symbol and a parenthetical year that the Code's own pages never print. Both forms are official Indiana instructions. They just come from different branches.

Who puts out what

The Legislative Services Agency does the publishing. Its Indiana Register and Administrative Code Division acts as the publishing branch of the Legislative Council for two products: the Indiana Administrative Code, which compiles the text of every permanent administrative rule, and the Indiana Register, a serial that carries proposed rules, final rules, hearing notices, nonrule policy documents, executive orders and attorney general opinions.

The first official edition of the IAC came out in 1979. It was republished in 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2001, then annually from 2003. Since the 2007 edition the compilation has been updated on the Register as final rules take effect, so the IAC you read is a rolling text.

The Register used to be monthly. From July 1, 1978 to July 1, 2006 it was printed on a schedule. Beginning July 2, 2006 it exists only on the Register site. Final rules there get codified into the IAC later, which makes the Register an advance sheet. The other documents in it never get codified at all.

Four numbers, and the third one is a rule

Both of Indiana's big codes use four levels, and the labels differ between them. A statute cite runs title, article, chapter, section, so IC 35-42-1-1 is Title 35, Article 42, Chapter 1, Section 1, the murder statute. A rule cite runs title, article, rule, section:

410 IAC         Title 410, the Indiana Department of Health
410 IAC 1       Article 1, communicable disease control
410 IAC 1-1     Rule 1, immunization of school children
410 IAC 1-1-1   Section 1, immunization requirements

That middle word is the trap. In the IAC, "rule" names a level of the hierarchy, and it sits above the section. When an Indiana agency says it is amending a rule, it may mean the whole of 410 IAC 1-1. Your single section is one piece of that. Read the document heading before you assume the scope.

Decimals are the other thing to expect. Indiana inserts a chapter or an article by giving it a tenth, which is why IC 4-22-2.5 and IC 4-22-2.6 sit between IC 4-22-2 and IC 4-22-3. The drafting manual caps the value at .9 and allows one only when the next whole number is already taken. Sort your citations as text and these land in the wrong order.

The five-year clock

Indiana rules die of old age. Under IC 4-22-2.6-1, a rule adopted through the ordinary rulemaking sections expires on January 1 of the fifth year after the year it took effect, unless it expires or is repealed sooner. Amending or readopting it restarts the count from the new effective date. Agencies now run readoption dockets on a timetable to keep their chapters alive.

That shows up in the counts. Of 37,522 Indiana regulation sections, 25,858 are in force, 8,994 are repealed and 1,023 have expired. Another 1,471 were transferred. A transfer is a move. The general assembly shifted the text from one agency's jurisdiction to another, and it is live law at a new address.

Indiana never recycles either kind of number. The drafting manual is flat about it. If an entire article, rule or section is repealed, the repealed number may not be reused, and a transferred number may not be reused either. So an old cite that resolves to nothing has not been quietly reassigned to some unrelated rule. It is just empty.

A worked example

Say a client sends you 312 IAC 9-3-2 and asks whether it still binds them. Work the number outward. Title 312 tells you which body adopted it. Article 9 narrows the subject. Rule 3 is the rule, and section 2 is the piece you were sent.

Now check two dates rather than one. The section's own history line gives you the last effective date, and the five-year clock runs from there. Then look at the article's readoption history on the Register, because a readoption of the whole article resets sections inside it without changing a word of their text. A rule that reads current can still be a rule whose clock ran out, and a rule that looks untouched since 2019 may have been readopted twice.

Would you have checked the article as well as the section? Most people check only the section.

What will bite you

Rule 22(B) prints a citation form for the Indiana Code, the IAC, the Register and seventeen named sets of court rules. It prints none for attorney general opinions, though the Register publishes those alongside the rules. We hold 9,760 of them, a deep series for a state this size, and the absence of a prescribed form means you should give the reader enough of the Register document identifier to find it.

The other one is the parenthetical year in Rule 22(B). It belongs to the citation format, and it is a year of the Code edition. Copying a year across from an unrelated source is the fastest way to point a judge at the wrong text.

Facts used

All Indiana 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.