How to Find and Cite Maine Law

Until 2023, Maine's constitution went to press with three of its own sections missing. The provision that ordered them out was itself part of the constitution, and it said that one of the three remained binding anyway.

That provision was Article X, Section 7, and Maine voters repealed it in November 2023. Look at the current official arrangement and Section 7 survives only as a heading with a history note under it reading CR 2023, c. 1 (RP). Sections 1, 2 and 5 of Article X are printed again in full.

Section 5 is the one that carried weight. It writes the Articles of Separation, the terms on which Maine split from Massachusetts, into the constitution, and those terms include obligations toward the tribes in the territory that became Maine. For roughly 147 years that text was binding and absent from the book at the same time.

Three offices, three publications

The Office of the Revisor of Statutes maintains the Maine Revised Statutes and puts them on the Legislature's website. That site carries its own warning: the statutory text there is offered as a public service and is not officially certified by the Secretary of State.

Agency rules go somewhere else entirely. An agency files its adopted rule with the Department of the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State organises what comes in as the Code of Maine Rules.

The constitution has a third custodian, and it is a judge. Article X, Section 6 directs the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court to arrange the constitution under appropriate titles and in proper articles, parts and sections, omitting all sections, clauses and words not in force, and to submit that arrangement to the Legislature. The job comes round in 1973 and every 10 years after. The version you read today was approved by Resolve 2023, chapter 86.

The abbreviation tells you the vintage

Maine's own citation guide, the one the bar works from, states the split directly. The Law Court cites Maine Revised Statutes (M.R.S.) for current statutes and Maine Revised Statutes Annotated (M.R.S.A.) for statutes dated 2004 and earlier. Either is acceptable in practice, but the choice is a date signal, and a parser that folds the two forms together throws that signal away.

Current statute        14 M.R.S. § 1851
Older statute          26 M.R.S.A. § 629-B(3) (2007)
Law Court opinion      Estate of Hoch v. Stifel, 2011 ME 24, ¶ 11, 16 A.3d 137
Agency rule            06-096 C.M.R. ch. 2, § 7(B) (2013)
Constitution           Me. Const. art. X, § 5

Two traps live in that block. Maine statutes are organised into titles and most titles have chapters, but the chapter number never appears in a statute citation. And the title token is not always an integer. There is a Title 17 and a separate Title 17-A, and they are different bodies of law.

On the case side, the Law Court has used a public domain citation with numbered paragraphs since January 1, 1997. Pinpoint to the paragraph and you can drop the parallel page reference.

A rule citation names its department twice

Read 06-096 C.M.R. ch. 2, § 7(B) from the left. The two-digit 06 is the department, Environmental Protection. The three-digit 096 identifies a subagency or a subdivision of that department's rules, here the procedural rules. C.M.R. comes after those five numbers, then the chapter, then the section. In print the same rule picks up a volume number in front, as 2 C.M.R. 06 096 002-3 § 7(B) (2013), and the volume number does not exist online.

So a Maine rule address is a small hierarchy of institutions with the subject matter arriving last.

Whether a rule is finished depends on a word in the statute

Here is the part that catches people. Since January 1, 1996, every grant of rulemaking power in a Maine statute has to put the rule in one of two categories, and the Legislature assigns the category when it writes the authorising law.

Routine technical rules are procedural, plus everything that is not major substantive. Major substantive rules are the ones the Legislature judges to need significant agency discretion in drafting, or to threaten a significant increase in the cost of doing business, a significant reduction in property values, loss of government benefits, state mandates on local government or other serious burdens.

The categories buy very different endings. A routine technical rule is adopted by the agency and takes effect five days after filing. A major substantive rule can only be provisionally adopted. Under 5 M.R.S. § 8072, sub-§ 11, the agency may not finally adopt it unless legislation authorising adoption is enacted into law, or the Legislature lets the review session pass without acting. Final adoption then has to happen within 60 days of the effective date of that legislation, and the rule takes effect 30 days after the final adoption filing.

So a provisionally adopted Maine rule is a real document. Published, complete, still waiting on the Legislature. How would you know? The text in front of you will not say. The category was set in the statute that authorised the rule, sometimes in a single sentence such as the one in 38 M.R.S. § 489-E, which makes site location rules routine technical except for the ones adopted after January 1, 2010 under certain subsections of section 484, which are major substantive.

Five minutes on a Maine rule

1. Open the rule on the Secretary of State's site and note its five-digit prefix and chapter.
2. Find the enabling statute. Read the rulemaking section of that chapter, the way 38 M.R.S. § 489-E reads, and see which category it assigns.
3. If it says routine technical, the filing date plus five days is your effective date.
4. If it says major substantive, look for the legislation that authorised final adoption, then the final adoption filing, then add 30 days.
5. Cite the current text with the year of the version you read in parentheses.

What bites

Maine's rule corpus is small for a state of its statutory size, 1,717 regulation sections against 25,316 statute sections. A lot of the operative detail sits in the statutes, so a Maine research question that would be a regulations question elsewhere often resolves in the M.R.S.

Watch the hyphenated titles, because 17 and 17-A are not neighbours in substance. Watch the M.R.S. and M.R.S.A. boundary at 2004. And treat a Maine rule's publication as the beginning of the question about its status rather than the answer.

Facts used

All Maine 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.