How to Find and Cite Mississippi Law

A Mississippi regulation ends with one line of provenance, and it points backwards. That line names the statute that gave an agency permission to act. Nothing in it records when the regulation was adopted, or whether anyone has touched it since.

The Secretary of State's own filed rules require that line and say exactly what it does. It identifies the statutory authority for the adoption, amendment or repeal of the rule, and the same rules add that it sits there for reference only and is not substantive rule text.

Who runs the filing cabinet

The Secretary of State, and further into the process than you might expect. Under Miss. Code Ann. § 25-43-2.101 that office prescribes the numbering, form and style every agency has to use, publishes proposed and adopted rules in the Mississippi Administrative Bulletin, and compiles the Mississippi Administrative Code. It can reject a filing on form, though never on substance.

The same statute says the Code must publish all of the effective rules of each agency. Read that as a definition and a lot follows. The Code is a list of what is in force right now. It was never built to be a history.

The history lives in the Bulletin instead. A rule moves out of the Bulletin and into the Code once its final effective date arrives. Bulletin publications stay on the Secretary of State's website for up to five years. Beyond that the office reserves the right to hold an archive in any practical medium and to charge a retrieval fee.

Five years. That is the public shelf life of the paper trail behind a Mississippi rule.

The Code has a start date, and it is not 1972

Every agency had to hand the Secretary of State a complete and current compilation of its rules by June 30, 2011, formatted the new way. Agencies that had already complied with the earlier organization rules by January 1, 2010 were allowed to keep their title assignment and structure.

So the electronic Code standing today rests on a mass refiling. Whatever an agency left out of its compilation never made it in.

Citing statutes

Miss. Code Ann. § 75-24-5. Title 75, chapter 24, section 5. The consumer protection section, the one banning unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive trade practices in or affecting commerce.

Two things about that cite are Mississippi specific.

The Ann. is doing real work. Under Miss. Code Ann. § 1-1-8 the official code of the public statute laws of the state is the Mississippi Code of 1972 Annotated, and it is that annotated compilation which courts and public officers are directed to treat as evidence of the statute law. The annotated version is the official one, which runs against most people's instinct.

And the year in the name belongs to the codification, not to the law. Bills filed in 2025 still read "Section 75-24-5, Mississippi Code of 1972, is amended as follows." Putting (1972) in a parenthetical says nothing at all about the age of the text. Where Mississippi sources do carry a year, it is the revision year of the volume, written as (Rev. 2006).

Citing rules

[title] Mississippi Administrative Code, Pt. __, R. __.__

The Secretary of State's rules give the worked example. A rule numbered 2, in chapter 30, in Part 2 of title 1, is cited as 1 Mississippi Administrative Code Pt. 2, R. 30.2. Short form, 1 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. 2, R. 30.2.

Watch what the rule number is doing. R. 30.2 means chapter 30, rule 2. The chapter is folded into the prefix and there is no separate chapter field anywhere in the citation. So R. 30.2 is chapter 30 rule 2, and R. 3.2 is chapter 3 rule 2. One digit apart, two unrelated chapters.

Titles are assigned by the Secretary of State and map either to an agency or to a broad subject area. Which one you get is listed in an Index of Titles, and that index can be updated without going through rulemaking at all. So the map from a title number to an agency can shift without any notice period. When did you last check that the title number in an old cite still points where it used to?

The gap between 218 and 34,608

Mississippi has 56,809 regulation sections. 21,013 read as in force. 967 are reserved. 218 are marked repealed, two rescinded, one deleted.

That leaves 34,608 with no status marker. Sixty-one percent of the regulation sections.

Now hold 218 next to 34,608 for a second. Repeals in Mississippi do get published, and the Secretary of State's rules set out the exact shape. The rule citation, the caption, the word REPEALED in capitals, and the effective date of the repeal. That is a Bulletin filing. Once the Code is supplemented, the repealed rule is simply no longer among the effective rules, so nothing is left in the Code to carry a mark.

Which means the 218 are the cases where a tombstone happened to survive. The other 34,608 are rules whose adoption date, amendment history and current standing all sit somewhere other than the words in front of you.

The statutes look ordinary next to that. 28,931 of Mississippi's 29,785 statute sections read as in force and 854 as repealed. The constitution runs 318 sections with 21 repealed.

The check that actually works

Start at the rule and read its Source line. That gives you a statute. Pull the statute and ask whether it still says what the rule is assuming.

Then go the other direction. Search the Bulletin by agency for the Part you care about. Inside the five year window you get the notice filings, which do carry dates, plus the strike-through variance an agency has to file showing precisely which words came out and which went in.

Outside that window you get the Code, and the Code will hand you text with no date on it.

So before you rely on a Mississippi rule, ask yourself a cheaper question than "is this current." Ask when this was last visible in the Bulletin. If the answer is never, in five years of filings, then nobody has amended it in five years, which is useful on its own.

Three ways to misread a rule here

A missing rule is ambiguous. It could be repealed, renumbered when an agency recompiled a whole Part, or never filed in the first place. The Code looks identical in all three cases.

Emergency rules. An emergency rule under the Administrative Procedures Act holds for no longer than 120 days and can be renewed once for another 90. The agency is free to then adopt an identical rule the ordinary way. Same words, different legal footing, and the Code shows you the survivor.

The Source line is not law. The Secretary of State's rules say the source information following a rule is for reference only and is not substantive rule text. Do not build an argument on it.

Facts used

All Mississippi 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.