How to Find and Cite South Dakota Law

A South Dakota rule filed with the secretary of state is only provisionally effective. It does not become finally effective before the first of July following the next legislative session, and six legislators can vote it out in the meantime.

The six are the Interim Rules Review Committee, three from each chamber. SDCL 1-26-38 gives a majority of them power to suspend a provisional rule or one that has not taken effect at all. They have to give the agency two weeks notice of a hearing, hold the hearing, and file a resolution with the secretary of state. At that hearing the burden of proof sits on the agency, which has to show its own rule is necessary and consistent with the statute it was written under. A suspended rule stays dead until July first of the year after it became, or would have become, effective.

That power comes from Article III, section 30 of the state constitution, added in 1980, which lets the Legislature empower a joint committee to stop rules from going into effect until July 1 after it reconvenes.

So when is a rule actually law

Walk the last three steps. The agency presents the rules to the committee. Once the committee deems the process complete, the agency has sixty one days to file with the secretary of state. The rule is provisionally effective on the twentieth day after that filing, and finally effective the first of July after the next session.

Which means a rule you find on the state's site can be in any one of three conditions, and the publication itself looks identical in all three. Ask what the filing date was before you advise anyone to rely on it.

Where the law lives

The statutes are the South Dakota Codified Laws. SDCL 2-16-13 is headed Publications constituting official code, and what follows is a numbered list of bound volumes with a revision year each. Volume 5 is the 2004 revision. Volume 16 is the 2024 revision. Volume 20A is the 2025 revision. The official code is that specific set of books, and a volume last revised in 2004 is as official as one printed this decade.

SDCL 2-16-16 then handles the obvious problem. Acts of the most recent session are deemed enacted after the code, and where a statute repeals or contradicts the code, the statute wins. So the code is the baseline and the newest session laws sit on top of it.

Statutes with no stated effective date take effect on the first day of July after passage, under SDCL 2-14-16. A special session act waits ninety one days after final adjournment.

The citation forms, from South Dakota's own text

For statutes, the authority is in the code itself. SDCL 2-16-18 is headed Citation of code and says the code may be cited as "SDCL" followed by the number of the title, chapter, or section. Four letters, no periods inside them, no state name in front, no Ann. after. Write SDCL 1-26-38 and you have matched the statute that authorises the form.

For cases, South Dakota has a public domain citation rule, and it is also a statute. SDCL 15-26A-69.1 covers opinions released on or after January 1, 1996. The first citation carries the calendar year, the court designation S.D., and a sequential number assigned by the clerk of the Supreme Court. Pinpoint by the clerk's paragraph number, placed right after that sequential number. Where the opinion has been published in the regional reporter, the first citation adds that volume and first page as well. For opinions handed down before 1996, you start from the volume and page of the state or regional reports instead.

The practical effect is that a South Dakota opinion is citable and pinpoint citable the day it comes out, months before any reporter volume exists.

Administrative rules, and the colons

Rule numbers use colons: article, chapter, section, and sometimes a decimal subsection after that. So 64:06:01:01 is a Department of Revenue sales tax rule, and 67:16:01:01 is Social Services.

Every live rule ends with three lines. Source gives the history as Register volume and page with effective dates. General Authority names the statute that granted rulemaking power. Law Implemented names the statute the rule carries out. Those last two are mandatory. The Legislative Research Council reviews every rule for form, style and legality, and a rule with no general authority does not get approved, because rulemaking power in this state comes only from a statute.

Here is 64:06:01:01, on sales to armed services personnel, closing out:

Source: SL 1975, ch 16, § 1; 13 SDR 129, 13 SDR 134, effective July 1, 1987;
21 SDR 219, effective July 1, 1995; 28 SDR 178, effective July 1, 2002.
General Authority: SDCL 10-45-47.1(3). Law Implemented: SDCL 10-45-2.

What a dead rule looks like

Of 29,000 rule sections in the corpus, 19,752 are in force and 7,552 are repealed. Another 1,589 are transferred, which is a move and leaves the law alive at a new address. Rule 44:04:01:01 is one of those, and its entire content is a pointer saying it went to 44:73:01:01.

A repealed rule keeps its number and its catchline and loses everything else. Pull 20:42:02:19 and you get the heading Adoption of rules, the word Repealed, and a source line recording the 1975 session law that created it and the 1979 Register entry that killed it. The catchline survives. The rule does not. So a search hit on a promising title can be an empty shell, and you only find out by opening it.

Compare that with the statutes, where 39,589 sections include just 5 repealed and 12 reserved. South Dakota does its pruning in the rule book.

The attorney general opinions

There are 1,652 of them, which is a lot for a small state, and the reason is in SDCL 1-11-1. Subsection (6) lets the Legislature or either branch of it, the Governor, the auditor and the treasurer put questions to the attorney general in writing, free of charge. Subsection (5) then makes it a duty to mail out any opinion the attorney general judges to be of general interest to every state's attorney and county auditor in the state. So the opinions were built to circulate. They are persuasive material and nothing more, but in a state this size they are often the only sustained discussion of a provision you will find.

What to watch for

Filing dates on new rules. Colons in rule numbers, which break a search built for hyphens. Catchlines that outlive their rules. The volume revision years in SDCL 2-16-13 when someone asks which printing is official. And no periods in SDCL, ever.

Facts used

All South Dakota corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data.

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.