How to Find and Cite Louisiana Law

Louisiana runs on civil law. Its private law came down from French and Spanish codes rather than English judge-made precedent, and that one fact decides how the law is arranged, what the pieces are called, and how you cite them.

Every other state took the common law from England. Louisiana never did. So the habits you built in any other jurisdiction will half work here, which is worse than not working at all.

Legislation first, cases second

Open the Civil Code at article 1 and the whole theory is in eight words. "The sources of law are legislation and custom." Precedent isn't on the list. Article 2 calls legislation "a solemn expression of legislative will." Article 3 says custom comes from practice repeated for a long time, and that custom may not abrogate legislation. Article 4 covers the gap. When neither legislation nor custom reaches the situation, the court proceeds according to equity, which the article defines as "justice, reason, and prevailing usages."

Articles 9 through 13 then tell you how to read the words. Article 9 says that when a law is clear and unambiguous and applying it doesn't lead to absurd consequences, the law "shall be applied as written and no further interpretation may be made in search of the intent of the legislature." Article 13 says laws on the same subject have to be interpreted against each other.

Case law still matters. It just carries a different name and a different weight. Louisiana courts work by jurisprudence constante, not stare decisis, and the state's high court drew the line in Doerr v. Mobil Oil Corp., 00-0947 (La. 12/19/00), 774 So. 2d 119. A single case is enough foundation for stare decisis. Jurisprudence constante needs "a series of adjudicated cases, all in accord." One appellate opinion on your facts is worth reading, and it is not the rule.

Two statute books, two kinds of number

Louisiana publishes named codes and one numbered compilation, and mixing them up is the fastest way to get a cite wrong.

The codes are the civil law core. Civil Code, Code of Civil Procedure, Code of Evidence, Code of Criminal Procedure, Children's Code. Their provisions are articles, never sections.

La. Civ. Code art. 2315

Article 2315 sits in the chapter the Code titles "Of Offenses and Quasi Offenses," which is Louisiana's law of torts. Note what's missing. No section symbol, no year parenthetical, and the word article shortened to art. with a lowercase a.

Everything else lives in the Louisiana Revised Statutes of 1950, and R.S. 1:1 sets the form itself. Write R.S., then the title number, a colon, then the section number.

La. R.S. 23:921(F)(1)(a)(ii)

Title 23 is labor. The colon has no spaces around it, and under Louisiana court custom there's no section symbol anywhere in that cite, because the first number is a title rather than a section. National citation manuals insert one anyway, which puts a section symbol in front of a title number. That's the first thing that breaks a parser.

The second thing is that one statute has several legitimate spellings. Court custom writes La. R.S. 23:921 and also LSA-R.S. 23:921. Manuals write La. Rev. Stat. and La. Stat. Ann. The Civil Code shows up as La. Civ. Code art. 2315, La. C.C. art. 2315, and LSA-C.C. art. 2315, all pointing at the same article. If you match Louisiana citations by string, plan for that now rather than later.

Cases carry a number of their own too. Under the Louisiana Supreme Court's general administrative rules, appellate opinions issued after 1993 lead with a public domain citation made of the case name, the docket number with its letters stripped out, the court, and the month, day and year, with the regional reporter cite following as a parallel. The Doerr citation above is exactly that shape.

Who publishes the rules

Agency rules are promulgated each month in the Louisiana Register and then compiled into the Louisiana Administrative Code by the Office of the State Register, which sits inside the Division of Administration. The Administrative Procedure Act requires the Register at least once a month and the Code supplemented or revised at least every two years, and it names the governor as the publisher of both.

LAC 33:V.105(D)(1)

Title, colon, part in Roman numerals, period, section. The Code's own rule on citing itself, at LAC 1:I.103, uses LAC 35:XI.315 as the model.

Currency works title by title. The state posts a last-amended date for each LAC title, and they're nowhere near each other. Cultural Resources was last amended in April 2026. Community Affairs, in September 2015. So the LAC's currency has no single answer. It has one per title.

A worked example that moved last year

Suppose a 2023 memo lands on your desk citing La. Civ. Code art. 3492 for the one-year prescription on a tort claim. Prescription is the civil law term for a limitations period, and the kind that kills a claim is liberative prescription.

Pull article 3492 up today and the whole text reads "Repealed by Acts 2024, No. 423, §2, eff. July 1, 2024." Article 3493 beside it says the same thing. The live rule moved to article 3493.1, which puts delictual actions on a liberative prescription of two years, running from the day the injury or damage is sustained. The same act pushed the old article 3493.10 down to 3493.3.

Would you have caught that from the citation alone? Nothing in "art. 3492" hints that it stopped being law in 2024. Three more things are worth slowing down for. The heading above that repealed pair still reads "One Year Prescription." The replacement carries a decimal, so any numeric sort has to handle 3493.1 falling between 3493 and 3494. And a brief citing 3493.10 now lands on an article whose only content is a note that it was redesignated.

Words that won't match your search

The Code keeps its own vocabulary. A tort is a delict. Real property is an immovable and everything else is a movable. A limitations period is a prescription. The right to use someone else's property for life is a usufruct, and the person holding it is a usufructuary. The Civil Code even carries a glossary for this, at Title XXV, "Of the Signification of Sundry Terms of Law Employed in this Code," articles 3506 through 3514.

Search Louisiana law for "real property" and you'll get the Revised Statutes and near silence from the Code. The Code has the rule. It's filed under another word.

Counted on 2026-09-18, Louisiana comes to 74,848 sections across five bodies of law. Statutes are the bulk at 43,582, with 43,312 in force, 257 repealed and 13 reserved. Regulations run 26,737, of which 26,561 are in force. Then 3,720 attorney general opinions, 481 court rule sections and 328 constitution sections. None of those AG opinions bind a court.

Before you read any Louisiana citation, check whether it says art. or carries a colon. Art. means the civil law core, where the text is the rule and the cases line up behind it. A colon means the Revised Statutes, and a title number sitting where you expected a section.

Facts used

All Louisiana 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.