How to Find and Cite Massachusetts Law

Say chapter 93A to a lawyer in Massachusetts and they'll know exactly what you mean. Say chapter 126 and the first thing they'll ask is what year.

There are two kinds of chapter in Massachusetts and they run on the same numbers. G. L. c. 126 is the General Laws chapter covering jails, houses of correction and reformation. St. 2022, c. 126 is the fiscal 2023 budget act, the 126th act signed that year. Same number, no relationship, and all that separates them in a citation is the letters out front.

What the Commonwealth publishes

The legislature is called the General Court. Everything it passes lands in the Acts and Resolves in the order it was signed, and those are the session laws. The ones that are permanent and general get codified by subject into the General Laws.

So a session law cite is a year plus a chapter number. A General Laws cite is a chapter number plus a section, with no year attached at all.

St. 2022, c. 126        session law, the 126th act of 2022
G. L. c. 93A, § 9       General Laws, chapter 93A, section 9

The year is the tell. Strip it off a session law cite and the cite is dead, because nothing else in it says which of the last two centuries you meant.

The Parts and Titles nobody writes down

Open chapter 93A on the legislature's site and the line above it reads Part I, Title XV. Open chapter 126 and it reads Part I, Title XVIII. Both levels are real and printed. Neither one shows up in a citation.

That works because chapter numbers don't repeat across the General Laws. Chapter 93A is chapter 93A wherever it sits, so the Part and the Title are shelving, useful when you want to see what's nearby and ignorable when you just want the text.

Letters are a different story. 93A is its own chapter, separate from 93. The letter belongs to the chapter number, not to a subsection.

Regulations are numbered by cabinet office

Agency rules live in the Code of Massachusetts Regulations, made under G. L. c. 30A, the state's administrative procedure act.

Every agency gets a three-digit title number from the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office, and that number has nothing to do with subject. The first digit is the cabinet office the agency reports to, so environmental agencies all begin with 3. The second and third digits pick out the individual agency. Chapters and sections come below that.

940 CMR 3.16
940   title, the Attorney General
3.00  chapter, consumer protection general regulations
3.16  one section inside that chapter

Watch the decimal. A cite ending in .00 means a whole chapter and a cite ending in anything else means one section of it, and those two are very different amounts of reading.

940 CMR 3.16 is a good one to know. Subsection (3) makes an act or practice a violation of G. L. c. 93A, § 2 if it fails to comply with existing statutes, rules, regulations or laws meant to protect the public's health, safety or welfare. Now read G. L. c. 93A, § 9, which gives a consumer a private action after a thirty day written demand, with double or treble damages on the table. Between those two provisions, a live Massachusetts regulation is a potential consumer protection claim. Whether a regulation is still in force stops being housekeeping at that point.

What the code doesn't say out loud

The CMR is a loose-leaf set and always has been. Three editions have been published, in 1976, 1978 and 1987. The current one came out in the spring of 1987 and runs to 25 volumes. It's kept current by filings published in the Massachusetts Register, which the Secretary of the Commonwealth issues every two weeks, and every filing arrives with instructions telling you which pages to take out before the new ones go in.

So when a regulation dies in Massachusetts, the page leaves the binder. No struck text, no repealed stamp, nothing left sitting at the old number.

Counted on 2026-09-18, Massachusetts holds 42,486 regulation sections. 17,763 carry a marker saying they're in force. 110 carry a marker saying they're dead in one way or another, and 288 are reserved, numbers held open with nothing under them. That leaves 24,325 with no status signal at all, which is 57 percent of the whole set.

Unknown is not dead. It means the published text says nothing either way, which is exactly what you'd expect from a format whose repeal mechanism is pulling a page. An unmarked CMR section is a question for the Register, not a body.

Some rules aren't in the code at all

Under G. L. c. 30A, § 2, an agency that decides immediate action is needed for the public health, safety or general welfare can adopt a regulation without notice or a hearing. Emergency regulations carry the same force as permanent ones. They also never get filed into the CMR, and they lapse after three months unless the agency takes them through the full process.

That means there is enforceable Massachusetts regulation the code simply does not contain. Each Massachusetts Register carries a cumulative table of emergency regulations arranged by CMR citation, with the issue number and the effective date, and the table states which Registers it covers. If the last three months span more issues than that, you go back further.

A lookup you can repeat

A demand letter arrives citing c. 93A and 940 CMR 3.16. What do you do with it?

1. Read § 9 and § 11 and pick the right one. Section 9 is the consumer action. Section 11 is the claim between businesses and it works differently.
2. Pull 940 CMR 3.00 as a whole chapter, not the single section. Scope and definitions sit elsewhere in the chapter and they change what 3.16 reaches.
3. Scan the last few Massachusetts Registers for any filing that touches 940 CMR 3.00, then check the emergency table in the same issue.
4. If the section text shows no date and no status, the Register is your status source. The text won't give you one.

What bites

A bare "chapter 126" with no year and no G. L. in front of it. Ask which book.

A title number read as a subject. It's an agency. Two unrelated agencies under one cabinet office sit right next to each other in the numbering.

Annotated editions with different abbreviations for the same section. Same law, different spine, and the chapter and section numbers match across all of them.

The rest of the corpus

Massachusetts comes to 67,662 sections counted on 2026-09-18. Statutes are 23,154 of those, with 23,067 in force, 85 reserved and 2 repealed. That's a very tidy statute book sitting next to a regulation set where more than half the sections say nothing about their own condition.

After that, 972 court rule sections, 529 attorney general opinions, 417 agency guidance documents and 104 constitution sections, 103 of them in force.

So write the prefix down before you write the number. In most states the number carries the address. In Massachusetts the two or three characters in front of it decide which body of law you are standing in.

Facts used

All Massachusetts 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.