How to Find and Cite Wyoming Law

Wyoming put it in writing that the number on a statute section carries no substantive law. W.S. 8-1-105(c) says statute numbers and headnotes are for reference and identification only, and lets the Legislative Service Office change them before or after an act passes.

So the address can move without anybody voting on the address.

There is a second lever. W.S. 28-8-105(a)(v) lets the same office, preparing copy for a revision or compilation, correct punctuation, spelling, grammar, section numbers or headings, as long as the meaning does not change. Between them, Wyoming has 1,069 statute sections marked renumbered.

The stub tells you a section moved, and sometimes nothing else

When a Wyoming section moves, the old number stays in the book as a one-line stub. Two shapes turn up.

The helpful shape names the new home:

15-4-210.  Renumbered as 15-4-301 by Laws 2007, Ch. 124, § 1.

The unhelpful shape doesn't:

4-1-101.   Renumbered by Laws 1979, ch. 142, § 3.

Same status, half the information. Across the state's own text-only titles, 172 stubs point at a session law chapter and leave the destination for you to work out. The older moves tend to be the bare ones. And the session law volumes on the legislature's site run back to 2008, so a 1979 chapter means print or a library.

Either way, a stub is live law at a new address. Never file it next to the repealed sections.

The status sits where the subject normally sits

Wyoming writes a section's fate into the headnote slot, in place of a title. Repeals read like this: Repealed by Laws 2025, ch. 9, § 2.

That slot carries the whole spread. W.S. 35-2-801 through 35-2-807, the article that once held the State Health Care Data Authority, all read Terminated by Laws 1985, ch. 217, § 2. W.S. 9-2-2603 reads Vetoed by Governor March 25, 2002, a number the code kept for a law that never existed. W.S. 35-2-118 reads simply Reserved.

Now the trap. Some live sections are about expiry, and their real subject lands in the same slot:

1-18-114.   Omitted parties; definitions.
33-12-129.  Expired and lapsed licenses; relicensure.
33-21-131.  Inactive status; reactivation or reinstatement.

Those three are in force. Read the first word and you would call them dead. So the test is what follows it. Repealed by Laws, Terminated by Laws, Renumbered by Laws and Vetoed by Governor are statuses. A word followed by punctuation and a subject is a heading.

Ever had a cite come back empty and assumed a repeal? In Wyoming that guess is wrong more often than it is right.

How Wyoming writes its own cites

Inside the code, Wyoming refers to itself with two letters. W.S. 9-1-801, W.S. 7-18-102(a)(i). The drafting rule at 8-1-105(b) sets the levels: lowercase letters for subsections, lowercase Roman numerals for paragraphs, capital letters for subparagraphs, capital Roman numerals below that. So (a)(i)(A)(I) is a depth you will meet, and the numeral type tells you where you are.

Case citations are stranger, because the right form depends on the day the ruling issued. The Wyoming Supreme Court adopted a public domain, neutral format by general order on October 2, 2000, then amended it on August 19, 2005. That leaves three regimes:

• Issued before January 1, 2001: reporter only. Jon v. Doe, 989 P.2d 472, 475 (Wyo. 1997), short cited Jon, 989 P.2d at 475.
• Issued January 1, 2001 through December 31, 2003: Jon v. Doe, 2001 WY 12, ¶ 44, 989 P.2d 1312, 1320 (Wyo. 2001), short cited Jon, ¶¶ 44-45 with no reporter at all.
• Issued on or after December 31, 2003: the neutral cite alone will do. Jon v. Doe, 2001 WY 12, ¶ 44 (Wyo. 2001).

The pin cite is a paragraph in every regime after 2000. Matching cites across a pile of briefs? Key on the year-plus-WY-plus-number string and treat the reporter as optional.

Rules live with the Secretary of State

Wyoming keeps its administrative rules in one electronic repository run by the Secretary of State's office, which holds the filings and publishes the Wyoming Administrative Code. A rule's address is the agency number, the program number and the chapter number, and the effective date is part of saying which version you mean.

W.S. 16-3-104(a) gives an agency seventy-five days from adoption to file a certified copy with the registrar of rules. Miss that window and the rule is not effective. W.S. 16-3-105(a)(i) says the code contains each rule adopted by a state agency and shall not contain emergency rules, so an emergency rule is in force somewhere browsing the code will never show you. W.S. 16-3-105(c) makes the registrar's authenticated file stamp a rebuttable presumption that the rule was adopted and filed properly.

There is a legislative layer too. W.S. 28-9-108 bars filing any rule with the Secretary of State unless it has first gone to the Legislative Service Office for review, emergency rules excepted again. Under W.S. 28-9-107(c), a legislative order approved by both houses makes a rule null and void.

Attorney general opinions, and one that was pulled

Formal opinions are numbered by year and sequence, like 2016-001, and the office marks status on the published list. Opinion 2016-001 is flagged WITHDRAWN, with the reason given: the Wyoming Supreme Court in Gordon v. State, 2018 WY 32, 413 P.3d 1093 (Wyo. 2018) disagreed with significant portions of it, so it was withdrawn to avoid confusion. The opinion is still readable. It just stopped being the office's position, and the decision that displaced it is named for you.

A lookup you can repeat

Someone hands you a brief citing W.S. 4-1-101 and the number resolves to a stub.

1. Read the stub. If it says Renumbered as, go straight to the number it gives.
2. If it only names a session law, note the year and chapter. Here that is 1979, chapter 142, section 3.
3. Pull that chapter. Post-2008 volumes are on the legislature's site, earlier ones are a library request.
4. Read the text at the new number, because Wyoming often amends in the act that moves a section.
5. Stop reading only for Repealed by, Terminated by or Vetoed by.

What bites

A renumbered stub read as a repeal. That is the expensive one, and 1,069 sections sit in that state.

A short cite from 2002 that carries a paragraph and no reporter, which no reporter-keyed index will match.

A rule adopted as an emergency, which the code will not show you.

A live section whose heading starts with Expired, Omitted or Inactive.

The rest of the corpus

Wyoming comes to 35,758 sections. Statutes are 20,995 of them: 16,370 in force, 3,532 repealed, 1,069 renumbered, 13 reserved, 7 terminated and 1 vetoed. Then 13,348 regulation sections, 1,020 court rule sections, 316 constitution sections, 62 agency guidance documents and 17 attorney general opinions.

The state sells its statutes as 43 titles plus the constitution plus a set of non-codified water laws. The code leaves part of the statute book outside itself.

Facts used

All Wyoming 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.