How to Find and Cite Texas Law

A bill the Texas Legislature passed in 2025 rewrote part of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and it does not take effect until April 1, 2027. Texas has been recodifying its own statutes a piece at a time since the 1960s, and that work is still running.

Which explains most of what makes Texas law awkward to pin down. The statute book is a building site with people living in it.

Separately named codes, plus the leftovers

Texas statutes sit in subject codes that each have their own name. Penal Code, Family Code, Property Code, Transportation Code, Government Code, Insurance Code, and on down the list. The Legislative Council's long range plan is 27 of them, and it has been working toward that number under what is now Section 323.007 of the Government Code. Every code starts its numbering over from the top, so the name in a cite carries as much weight as the digits do.

The plan has never been finished. Material from the 1925 Revised Civil Statutes that nobody ever folded into a named code is still sitting on the state's own statutes site under a heading of its own. Much of what is left is municipal pension law. If you work on Texas police and fire pensions, you are reading the 1925 arrangement, not a code.

Some Texas law is numbered by article

Most codes use sections, written the way you would expect. Tex. Penal Code § 22.01 is assault.

Two big pieces of Texas law do not use sections at all. The Code of Criminal Procedure runs on articles, so the state exclusionary rule, the one that keeps illegally obtained evidence out of a criminal trial, is Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 38.23. The leftover civil statutes run on articles too, and those numbers grew letters over the decades. When a new law arrived on an old subject, drafters glued a letter onto the end of the existing article rather than open a fresh number. That is how you end up with article 6243g-4.

So a correct Texas cite might say section or it might say article. Picking the wrong word usually means you are in the wrong book.

Rules lead with a title number

Agency rules live in the Texas Administrative Code, which the Secretary of State compiles and publishes. There are 17 titles. Changes show up first in the Texas Register, which comes out weekly.

An administrative cite starts with the title. 28 Tex. Admin. Code § 19.810 is a Department of Insurance rule headed License Renewal and Application for an Expired License. Chapter and section numbers repeat across those 17 titles, so the leading number is not decoration. Take it off and there is nothing to look up.

What the corpus looks like

These counts come from Vaquill AI's US primary law corpus, measured on 2026-09-18. Texas holds 172,469 sections, split like this.

• Statutes: 122,630
• Regulations: 43,500
• Attorney General opinions: 3,502
• Agency guidance: 1,284
• Court rules: 1,050
• Constitution: 503

Outright repeal is rare on the statute side. 308 sections carry a repealed status and another 170 are reserved, out of 122,630. The constitution runs the other way. Of its 503 recorded provisions, 413 are in force and 87 are repealed. Texas amends its constitution by statewide vote and does it often, and the retired provisions keep their numbers in the published document. Quoting a Texas constitutional provision by number without reading its status is a real way to quote dead law.

What actually moves in Texas

Take expunction of criminal records. Until the start of 2025 it lived in Chapter 55 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. A 2023 act moved the whole thing into a new Chapter 55A and repealed the old chapter. The bill analysis is flat about the intent. The substance "has not been altered," and the purpose was to "compile the relevant law, arrange it in a logical fashion, and rewrite it without altering its meaning or legal effect."

Same law. New addresses. Article 55A.051 now opens the mandatory expunction subchapter, and the note printed under it reads "Added by Acts 2023, 88th Leg., R.S., Ch. 765 (H.B. 4504), Sec. 1.001, eff. January 1, 2025."

There is also a general code update bill most sessions. The Legislative Council lists its purposes plainly, and one of them is to "appropriately renumber duplicate official citations." Read that again. Texas sometimes ends up with two provisions wearing the same official number, and the repair is to move one of them. The most recent one passed in 2025 and took effect September 1 of that year.

When did you last check whether the Texas cites in your own templates still point where they did two sessions ago?

A worked example you can repeat

Say you inherit a memo citing Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 55.01.

1. Look up Chapter 55 on the state's statutes site. The chapter is gone, repealed effective January 1, 2025.
2. Go to Chapter 55A, Expunction of Criminal Records. The subchapter you want opens at article 55A.051.
3. Read the note under the article. It names the act, the chapter of the session laws, the bill number and the date the new number became real.
4. Check that effective date before you rely on the text. A Texas act passed in one session can take effect two years later.
5. If the cite is a rule rather than a statute, start from the title number, then the chapter, then the section, and look to the weekly Register for the issue where the change was first printed.

A few more things that bite

The Secretary of State moved the Administrative Code onto a new state portal. Old deep links into the previous site now land on a notice saying the site has moved. Pin whichever address you actually read from, and check it still resolves.

Texas has two courts of last resort. The Supreme Court of Texas takes civil and juvenile appeals and the Court of Criminal Appeals takes criminal ones. Only Texas and Oklahoma split it that way, so a criminal cite pointed at the civil court is a tell that someone was working from a template built for another state.

Attorney General opinions are numbered with the initials of the attorney general who signed them, followed by a sequence, so KP-0477 is an author and a count rather than a docket number. Courts treat them as persuasive and the office's own description says the ultimate determination of a law's meaning is left to the courts. Of the 3,502 opinions in the count above, 3,426 are in force, 68 have been superseded and 8 withdrawn.

The recodification will keep going, session after session, so treat any Texas number you have not checked this year as a lead rather than an address.

Facts used

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.