How to Find and Cite New Mexico Law

You can pinpoint a paragraph of a decision in Volume 1 of the New Mexico Reports the same way you'd pinpoint one handed down last week. In 2013 the state's justices went back through the whole run of reported opinions and numbered every paragraph in all of them.

The pin cite in New Mexico is a paragraph, not a page, however old the decision.

Case cites, and the volume that ended

The Clerk of the Supreme Court assigns the official citation. It carries the year, the initials of the court, and a three digit number that restarts each January.

Bianco v. Horror One Prods., 2009-NMSC-006, ¶ 10, 145 N.M. 551

NMSC is the Supreme Court and NMCA is the Court of Appeals. The parallel cite to the New Mexico Reports is required, but only up to Volume 150, because that was the last volume of the series. Anything after it has no parallel cite to give, so State v. Dickert, 2012-NMCA-004, ¶ 28 is complete exactly as it stands. The Pacific Reporter cite is optional. The unofficial hardbound Appellate Reports are not to be cited under any circumstances.

Two publishers, and they do not overlap

The New Mexico Compilation Commission is the state's official legal publisher. It puts out the statutes and the court rules and runs the free public database of both.

The regulations belong to somebody else entirely. The Commission of Public Records, which is also the agency that runs the state archives, has compiled the New Mexico Administrative Code and published the New Mexico Register since 2002. Its administrative law division takes rule filings, prints them in the Register, and posts them to the NMAC once they take effect.

So the same office that keeps the territorial land grant records tells you whether a water quality rule is in force.

The statute cite has two dates in it

New Mexico cites its statutes by Comp number, which is chapter, article and section of the 1978 compilation.

Section 7-2C-8 NMSA 1978

Two things about that. The 1978 is the compilation, and it does not move. A section the legislature wrote last year still belongs to NMSA 1978. And the Comp chapter number has no relation to the chapter number an act gets in the session laws, so you cannot work backwards.

The court's citation rule then wants a year in parentheses after the first occurrence.

NMSA 1978, Section 39-3-1.1(C) (1999)

That year is the enactment, or the most recent amendment that applies to your case, and you take it from the history note on the section. If you mean an older text, you say so inside the cite, as (1998, amended 1999). For a whole act, give the first year and the last, as in NMSA 1978, §§ 41-5-1 to -29 (1976, as amended through 2021). Do not write et seq.

One habit to pick up. Spell out and capitalize the word Section when the reference sits inside a sentence or opens a citation sentence. Use the section symbol everywhere else.

Subdivision cites run backwards

When you point below the section level, New Mexico starts at the smallest piece and walks up.

Subparagraph (b) of Paragraph (3) of Subsection A of Section 33-2-5 NMSA 1978

The legislature's drafting manual says in so many words that this must not be written as Section 33-2-5A(3)(b). The citation also has to be closed off, meaning it runs until it cannot run any further.

The administrative code does the same thing. Below the section, designations go in front, so it is Subsection A of 3.1.3.8 NMAC.

Would your citation parser survive that? Most of them read left to right and expect the section number first.

Regulation cites carry a version date

The NMAC's citation rule is 1.24.10.9 NMAC, which is the code explaining how to cite the code. The short form is title, chapter, part and section separated by periods, then NMAC. So 3.1.3.8 NMAC.

The full form adds the part name, the issuing agency and, in parentheses, the effective date of the version you mean. Where a provision has been amended, the rule says the date is the effective date of the version being cited. So that parenthetical is doing real work. Two people citing 3.1.3.8 NMAC with different dates are citing different text.

You get the date from the history line at the foot of the section. For 3.1.3.8 NMAC that line runs 11/5/1985, then 8/15/1990, then 10/31/1996, then a renumbering and amendment dated 12/29/2000. The last entry is the one you cite, which means the example printed in the citation rule itself is now out of date.

That line also shows the old citation, 3 NMAC 1.3.8. New Mexico restructured the administrative code around 2000, and the old format put the title number first with NMAC in the middle. Nothing written in that shape resolves against the current code.

Court rules, instructions and forms share one set

They all cite to the New Mexico Rules Annotated, by set and number. Rule 5-103 NMRA is criminal procedure. UJI 14-403 NMRA is a jury instruction. Form 9-406 NMRA is a form. LR2-308 NMRA is a local district rule. The leading number tells you which set, and rules take a year parenthetical too when you mean an older version.

What the numbers look like

New Mexico's statutes run to 31,115 sections. 27,281 are in force and 3,284 are repealed. Another 501 are marked recompiled, which is not the same as dead. When the legislature moves sections from one part of the compilation to another, it recompiles them, and the instruction to the compiler is temporary and never itself compiled. Treat recompiled as gone and you will report live law as dead.

Regulations are the larger corpus at 36,310 sections, with 35,752 in force. Court rules come to 3,462, of which 3,140 are current. The constitution adds 299 sections, cited as N.M. Const. art. VI, § 7. All of it together is 71,461.

A run you can repeat

Take any New Mexico section you need to cite. Find its history note, read off the last amendment year, and put that year in parentheses after the cite. Then write the subdivision the state's way, smallest piece first. Do it twice and the habit sticks.

What to watch for

The 1978 in NMSA 1978 is a compilation year, not the age of the law in front of you.

The parenthetical year is part of the citation. Drop it and nobody can tell which version of the section you relied on.

Subdivision cites run smallest to largest in both the statutes and the regulations, and anything sorting or parsing them needs to know that.

There is no parallel reporter cite after Volume 150, so do not go looking for one.

And two state bodies publish New Mexico law. If something is not where you expect it, check the other one.

Facts used

All New Mexico 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.