How to Find and Cite Nebraska Law

There is no conference committee in Nebraska. One chamber, so no second version of a bill ever needs reconciling, and a Nebraska legislative history is a shorter, cleaner thing to build.

Voters approved the single house at the 1934 ballot, after George Norris drove around the state arguing that a second chamber did the same job twice. The first one-house session met in 1937. It is still the only single-chamber state legislature in the country, and the only officially nonpartisan one. Party labels are not on the ballot, the top two from the primary meet in the general, and leadership is not handed out by party.

What one chamber does to the record

Three things follow. First, every bill is an LB. There is no HB and no SB, because there is no House and no Senate to distinguish. Open any section on the Legislature's site and the source line underneath reads like this:

28-101  Source
        Laws 1977, LB 38, § 1
        Laws 1980, LB 991, § 8
        Laws 1982, LB 465, § 1
        ...

That block is the section's whole amendment history, in order, sitting right under the text.

Second, except for a few technical bills, every bill gets a public hearing in committee. Hearings are open, anyone may testify, and a committee cannot act on a bill until the hearing has happened. So almost any Nebraska statute has a hearing record behind it.

Third, no conference report to chase and no reconciled text to compare. Norris wanted exactly that. He said conference committees met in secret and their votes were not public record.

Who publishes which half

The Revisor of Statutes publishes the statutes, from an office created in 1945 and placed in the Legislative Council in 1967. Under Neb. Rev. Stat. § 49-702 it also reports defects it finds in the statutes or the constitution.

The print set is hardbound volumes reissued a few at a time between sessions. In even-numbered years the office prepares a cumulative supplement holding everything amended since each volume was last reissued. In odd years, an annual supplement holding only what the most recent session passed.

Regulations come from a different branch entirely. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 84-906.03 makes the Secretary of State establish and publish the codification system, designated the Nebraska Administrative Code.

The parenthetical is the trap

A Nebraska statute cite carries a year in parentheses, and that year is not when the law passed. It names the printing you read it in.

Volumes are reissued on their own staggered schedule, so the right parenthetical depends on your chapter. Chapters 19 through 23 were last reissued in 2022. Chapters 24 through 43 in 2016. Chapters 78 through 81 in 2024.

One Nebraska Supreme Court opinion, McKay v. Bartels, 316 Neb. 235 (2024), manages four different answers:

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 23-1301 (Reissue 2022)
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 25-21,149 (Reissue 2016)
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 32-553(2) (Cum. Supp. 2022)
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 32-555(1) and (2) (Reissue 2016)

Look at the last two. Same chapter, different parentheticals, because one was amended after the volume went to print and the other was not.

So which year belongs on the section you are about to quote? It depends on when the section was last amended and when its volume was last printed. Two separate facts.

The appellate rule is strict about this. Under Neb. Ct. R. App. P. § 2-109(C)(5), a current statute must be cited from the last published revision or compilation, or from the supplement, and if it is in neither, from the session law or the legislative bill as enacted. So a section too new for the books gets cited to its LB. The one chamber shows up inside the citation itself.

Nebraska cases go to the official reports, and the court prints "Cite as 316 Neb. 235" at the top of its own opinions.

Rules: the title is the agency, the chapter is the subject

A Nebraska Administrative Code title belongs to an agency. Title 92 is the Department of Education, Title 68 is Correctional Services. Chapters inside a title are subjects, so Chapter 1 of Title 68 is good time credit. Sections are three digits with leading zeros, and subsections hang off with a decimal, so a rule runs 001, 002, 003, then 003.01.

What trips people is that an agency's rule is a chapter. The Department of Education spells this out on its own legal page: what it calls Rule 1 is formally Title 92, Nebraska Administrative Code, Chapter 1, abbreviated 92 NAC 1. So a Nebraska "Rule 10" is a chapter number, and hunting for a rule numbered 10 inside a chapter finds nothing.

The adoption path is unusually gated. After the public hearing, the regulation goes to the attorney general for a review of statutory and constitutional authority, then to the governor for policy review and final approval, and only then to the Secretary of State. Under § 84-906 it is not valid against anyone until five days after that filing.

Guidance documents are a different animal, and most are dead

Nebraska writes guidance out of the definition of a rule. Section 84-901(2) excludes guidance documents from what counts as a rule or regulation, and section 84-901(5) defines one as a statement that lacks the force of law but gives direction of general application, then adds the odd part: it binds the agency until the agency amends it.

Section 84-901.03 makes every guidance document carry a notice on its first page saying it is advisory in nature but binding on the agency until amended. Anyone may write in asking an agency to revise one, repeal it, or convert it into a real regulation, and the agency has sixty days to answer. Each agency also indexes its rules and guidance for the Clerk of the Legislature every December.

That machinery churns, and the churn shows. Counted on 2026-09-18, Nebraska holds 120 agency guidance documents. Only 42 are in force. Forty-seven are rescinded and thirty-one are superseded, which puts sixty-five percent of the shelf out of service.

Compare the rest of the corpus. Nebraska holds 28,502 statute sections, 28,429 in force, with two repealed, seventy reserved and exactly one flagged unconstitutional. Regulations run 13,624 sections, 13,538 in force. Add 1,191 attorney general opinions, 734 court rule sections and 444 constitution sections and the state comes to 44,615 in all. The statute book and the rule book are about as clean as they get. The guidance shelf is where the dead law sits.

That matters, because a live guidance document binds the agency that issued it and a rescinded one binds nobody. The page-one notice says the document is advisory. It does not say whether it still stands.

A lookup you can repeat

You are handed a 2019 brief citing Neb. Rev. Stat. § 32-555 (Reissue 2016).

1. Find which volume holds chapter 32 and check that volume's current reissue year.
2. If it has been reissued since 2016, the brief's parenthetical is stale even when the words have not moved.
3. Check the supplements next. Even years are cumulative, odd years cover one session.
4. If the section is in none of them, it is newer than the print run, so cite the LB.

What bites

A parenthetical that names a printing rather than a law, and two sections in one chapter that disagree about which.

An agency "rule" that is really a chapter number.

Guidance documents that read like rules, are not rules, and are mostly rescinded.

If you build one habit for Nebraska, make it reading that source line. Every change the section has ever taken is there as an LB and a year, sitting under the text on the Legislature's own site.

Facts used

All Nebraska 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.