How to Find and Cite Washington Law

Washington's courts publish their own table of abbreviations for Washington sources, and it replaces the Bluebook's. The second series of the state reports is Wn.2d, not Wash. 2d, so a lookup built on the wrong spelling comes back empty.

The table lives in GR 14, Appendix 1, the Office of Reporter of Decisions Style Sheet. General Rule 14 is the rule on citation format for papers filed with the court, and the appendix is what it points at. The style sheet names the Bluebook as the basic resource except as noted, then prints sixteen exceptions and a list of abbreviations that, in its own words, replaces the list of abbreviations for Washington materials found in Bluebook table T1.3.

So this is what you write:

Revised Code of Washington      RCW 49.60.030
Washington Administrative Code  WAC 173-400-030
Washington Reports              Wash. / Wn.2d / Wn.3d
Washington Appellate Reports    Wn. App. / Wn. App. 2d
Washington Constitution         Const. art. VI, § 1
Session laws                    Laws of 2002, ch. 107, § 3
Washington State Register       Wash. St. Reg.

Two rows in there will catch you out. The reporter switches its own shorthand partway down the shelf, so the first series is Wash. and everything after it is Wn. And the constitution cite carries no state name at all. Inside a Washington brief, article I, section 7, the one headed invasion of private affairs or home prohibited, is just Const. art. I, § 7.

One more, from exception 13 in that same appendix. Do not add the year in parentheses after a citation to a statute that is presently in effect. Just RCW 49.60.030, nothing after it.

One office publishes nearly all of it

The Office of the Code Reviser, working for the Statute Law Committee, puts out the Revised Code of Washington, the Washington Administrative Code, and the Washington State Register. Three products, one shop.

RCW 1.08.015 is the instruction. It tells the reviser to codify all laws of a general and permanent nature into the RCW and to assign permanent numbers to the titles, chapters and sections added. RCW 34.05.210 does the same job for rules, telling the code reviser to compile, index and publish the WAC and to revise it at least once a year.

Now the part people miss. The website is not the official RCW. The Statute Law Committee declares that the certified PDFs sitting in the RCW Archive are the official publication, and the online version refreshes only twice a year, once in the early fall after the session and again at the end of the year if a ballot measure changed the law. If you are reading in June, the compilation in front of you was assembled after last year's session.

Moved is not dead

Of Washington's 52,002 statute sections, 164 are repealed and 125 are marked recodified. Those 125 are live law. They just answer to a different number now.

Washington keeps dispositions pages for exactly this. Pull up chapter 70.94 RCW, the Washington Clean Air Act, and you get a list rather than a statute. RCW 70.94.011, the declaration of policy, reads "Recodified as RCW 70A.15.1005 pursuant to 2020 c 20 § 2010." Go to 70A.15.1005 and the declaration of policy is sitting there, live, under the new number. The whole chapter walked over to the new Title 70A in 2020 and left forwarding addresses behind.

The same page mixes in a third word. RCW 70.94.025 was a cross-reference section, and its line reads "Cross-reference section, decodified September 2011," which is removal from the code rather than repeal. Repealed, recodified, decodified. Three dispositions, three different consequences, and the page prints them in the same typeface.

Do you check whether a number resolves, or whether it still resolves to what your document assumed? In Washington those are separate questions.

Two series of attorney general opinion, and only one is still running

Washington holds 4,428 attorney general opinions, and they come in two flavors.

Formal opinions run from October 1949 to now and are cited as AGO, by year and number. They answer questions from a defined set of officials, they get drafted by an assigned lawyer, reviewed by the opinions editor and at least one more assistant attorney general, and finally approved by the attorney general. The office says they are not binding on courts but have historically drawn great respect and great weight.

The other series is AGLO, for attorney general letter opinion, and it ran from 1970 to 1982 only. These were the quicker answers. Each one still carries its own instruction at the top of the letter, in the form "Cite as: AGLO 1975 No. 1," and they sit in the same index as the formal opinions, one click away under their own year links.

The distinction matters because the office draws it sharply today. Informal letters are still the majority of the legal advice it gives on opinion requests, but the office says they should not be described or cited as Attorney General Opinions, and that an informal opinion should be cited as a letter of the attorney who signed it, with the date and the addressee. The numbered AGLO series is the era when informal answers got a citation of their own. Nothing since 1982 does.

One more thing the office says out loud, which is unusual and useful. It does not pull opinions down when the law underneath them changes. An opinion from 1974 stays up looking exactly as authoritative as one from last spring.

A five minute walk

Say a 2015 permit file cites RCW 70.94.152.

1. Type the cite into the RCW search at the legislature's site. You land on the chapter 70.94 dispositions page, not a section.
2. Read the bracket after the catchline. That is the session law history, oldest last.
3. Read the sentence after the bracket. Recodified, repealed, or decodified, with the act that did it.
4. Follow the new number. Confirm the text you relied on actually survived the move, because a recodification act can amend while it relocates.
5. For a rule, do the same in the WAC and then check the Washington State Register for anything filed since the last WAC compilation.

What bites

The twice-a-year RCW refresh is the big one. A statute amended in March is law in July and may not be in the online compilation you are reading.

Title 70A is not the only relocation, it is just the loudest. Any Washington statute number you inherited from a document more than a few years old deserves a dispositions check before you quote it.

And one thing worth a bookmark. Notice of pending formal opinion requests gets published in the Washington State Register, and interested parties can send the attorney general's office material on a question while the opinion is still being written. If a Washington statute matters to your work, that notice is the earliest warning you will get that somebody is about to put an official reading on it.

Facts used

All Washington 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.