How to Find and Cite North Dakota Law

Every time North Dakota's Supreme Court amends a court rule, the old version stays up at a separate address. Rule 1.1 is one sentence long and has four of them.

Repeat that across every set of rules the court keeps, for as long as the version tables go back, and the arithmetic gets loud. North Dakota's court rules corpus runs to 2,261 sections. 684 of those are current. 1,527 are marked superseded and another 37 repealed, which puts 1,564 of them, roughly 69%, out of operation. Counts taken 2026-09-18. No other state's court rules corpus we hold comes close to that share.

Three offices, three habits

The statutes are the North Dakota Century Code. The Legislative Council handles the codification, and the text on the Legislative Branch site is the official version. The site says so plainly and warns that it can differ from printed or online versions put out by private publishers. Sixty-five titles, each split into chapters, each split into sections.

The regulations are the North Dakota Administrative Code, published by the same Legislative Council. It first appeared on July 1, 1978 and gets updated quarterly.

Court rules come from the Supreme Court, and that's where the version history lives.

The citation form, and the two periods that decide everything

A Century Code cite is three numbers joined by hyphens.

N.D.C.C. § 12.1-17-01

Title 12.1 is the criminal code. The middle number puts you in chapter 12.1-17, which covers assaults, threats, coercion and harassment. The 01 is simple assault. Now look at the decimal in that title. North Dakota uses a decimal point to slot new material between two consecutively numbered items, and it does this in the Century Code and the Administrative Code both. So titles carry decimals. So do sections. N.D.C.C. § 12.1-17-01.1 is a whole separate section called Assault, sitting just after simple assault. Split that cite on hyphens and dots and you'll get five pieces where the state meant three.

Administrative Code numbers run four deep instead. N.D. Admin. Code § 75-03-08-27 is title 75 for the agency, then article 03, chapter 08, section 27.

Now the case law, which is where North Dakota gets genuinely sharp. The state was early to medium-neutral citation. Under N.D.R.Ct. 11.6, the first citation of any published Supreme Court opinion released on or after January 1, 1997 has to carry the calendar year, the designation ND, and a sequential number assigned by the clerk. Paragraph pinpoints use the ¶ symbol, because page numbers would be ambiguous.

Smith v. Jones, 1997 ND 15, ¶ 21

The rule's own explanatory note then spells out the trap. "N.D." with periods means the North Dakota Reports, printed between 1890 and 1953. "ND" without periods means the database of opinions filed after January 1, 1997. Same two letters. Six decades apart. Two full stops are the only thing separating them, and any parser that strips punctuation will fuse the two into one. So will a tired reader. Court of Appeals opinions use ND App on the same pattern.

What the version history actually looks like

Take N.D.R.Ct. 1.1, the scope rule. One sentence of operative text. Then an explanatory note saying it was amended effective January 1, 1995, then March 1, 1997, then March 1, 2010, then March 1, 2025.

Below that sits a table headed Version History, with an Effective Date column and an Obsolete Date column.

Every row is a live link to the full text of that version. Rule 11.6, the citation rule itself, carries three rows of its own.

So when something hands you N.D.R.Ct. 1.1, which of the four did it hand you? If the effective date isn't sitting next to the text, you don't have a rule yet. You have a rule-shaped document from an unnamed year, and three quarters of the candidates are wrong.

Four more places it goes wrong

Repealed rules keep their titles in the index. The Rules of Court listing still shows Rule 2.2, Facsimile Transmission, repealed effective March 1, 2009, and Rule 4.2, Notice to Interested Parties, repealed effective March 1, 2010. Rule 6.5 reads only [Repealed]. Rule 2.1 reads [Reserved For Future Use], which means the number is being held empty rather than struck. Those two look alike in a result list and mean opposite things.

Statutes behave better than the rules, though not perfectly. Of 29,042 Century Code sections, 25,189 are in force, 3,500 repealed, 292 superseded and 61 reserved. Regulations run 14,343 sections, with 11,524 in force against 1,475 repealed and 1,295 reserved. One regulation section is marked terminated. Exactly one is marked unconstitutional.

Attorney general opinions carry more weight here than that phrase usually suggests. North Dakota has 5,550 of them, more than twice the size of its court rules corpus. Under N.D.C.C. § 54-12-01, an attorney general's opinion governs the actions of public officials until the question in it is decided by a court. It doesn't bind a judge. It does bind the agency across the table from you, which changes what you're arguing about.

And a North Dakota rule can die in a way most states don't offer. The Legislature's Administrative Rules Committee can find all or part of a rule void where the adopting agency failed to comply with express legislative intent, or failed to substantially meet the procedural requirements of chapter 28-32 for adopting it. That's a death certificate issued by a legislative committee, not a court and not the agency.

None of this is the Supreme Court hiding anything. It published everything, dated everything, and left the sorting to you.

Facts used

All corpus counts are from the North Dakota data in Vaquill AI's US primary law corpus, measured 2026-09-18, across 51,634 North Dakota sections.

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.