Get a state session law's text

The act’s text exactly as printed, one page of about 30,000 characters at a time, cut at a paragraph break where one is near. Follow nextCursor while hasMore is true; pageStart / pageEnd / totalChars are character offsets into the whole text, and concatenating the pages in order reproduces it.

Cost: 6 credits per page served. Read estimatedBodyPages on the law first (charCount divided by about 30,000). A short act is one page; an omnibus act can be many. Each page is charged on its own, so you can stop whenever you have enough. pagePrice is what this page cost, totalPages the estimated pages in all, and estimatedRemainingCredits the pages still to come times the price.

Cost of reading a law. Reading a whole law is estimatedBodyPages times the price of one body page (6 credits). Both are on the record: charCount is its length in characters and estimatedBodyPages is that divided by the page size (about 30,000 characters), rounded up, and null unless the text is served. Most acts take a page or two. The longest we hold, Ohio’s 2025 budget act (HB 96, 9,571,132 characters), takes about 320 pages, 1,920 credits to read in full, so check estimatedBodyPages before you page through an omnibus act. Each body response then carries pagePrice (what that page cost) and estimatedRemainingCredits (the pages still to come times the price) so you can stop whenever you have enough.

Where a page starts. Follow nextCursor from the page before, or send startChar, a character offset into the text (0-based, the scale of pageStart and totalChars), to jump straight to a place you know without paging from the start. Send one or the other, never both (a 422, uncharged). A startChar page costs and sizes the same as any other, and returns a normal signed nextCursor. startChar has no version binding of its own, so add expectTextSha256 (the textSha256 you read the text under, in lowercase hex, 16 characters or more): if the text was re-collected since, the answer is a 409 and nothing is charged. A startChar at or beyond the end is a 422, refunded. There is no page-size parameter: a page is always about 30,000 characters, so its price is fixed.

Attribution. Every outcome carries citation, jurisdiction, session, approvedDate and sourceUrl, so a page is attributable on its own. sourceUrl is the official copy on a government host and is present when the text is withheld or not held, so a reader always has somewhere to go.

Id only. This route takes a sessionLawId, not a citation: resolve a citation once with GET /us/session-laws/{sessionLawId} and use the id it returns.

Not served, not charged. When we do not serve the text (textStatus is not held), the answer is a 200 with available: false and a reason (not_held, withheld, pending or empty_text), creditsConsumed: 0, the withheldReason for a withheld law, and the official sourceUrl. A federal id (SAL_...) is a 404 (federal_session_law); read federal session laws with GET /us/statutes/section/{actId}. An unknown id is a 404; a stale cursor or a mismatched expectTextSha256 is a 409 (start again without cursor); a malformed or expired cursor, cursor with startChar, or a startChar past the end is a 422. None of these is charged, and a failure on our side (500, 503) is refunded.

Amendatory markup. An amending act prints the language it deletes and inserts. Where amendatoryMarkup is preserved, that markup is in text in the convention markupConvention names: wdiff writes deleted language [-like this-] and inserted language {+like this+}; publisher_literal keeps the publisher’s own markers as printed (Minnesota’s new text begin and deleted text begin); mixed has both. Where it is lost, the publisher printed markup our text does not keep, so deleted words can read as law: check the source before quoting. Only the as printed text is served; there is no clean “as enacted” view.

Example

curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/SSL_MN_2025S1_G_Y2025_C1/body" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

# jump to a character offset, pinned to the version of the text you read
curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/SSL_MN_2025S1_G_Y2025_C1/body?startChar=29987&expectTextSha256=02693d5b55d4709b" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

const MY_BUDGET = 100; // the most you will spend to finish reading, in credits
let cursor;
let text = "";
do {
  const url = new URL("https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/SSL_MN_2025S1_G_Y2025_C1/body");
  if (cursor) url.searchParams.set("cursor", cursor);
  const res = await fetch(url, {
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.VAQUILL_API_KEY}` },
  });
  const page = await res.json();
  if (!page.available) break; // withheld or not held: page.sourceUrl is the official copy
  text += page.text;
  if (page.estimatedRemainingCredits > MY_BUDGET) break; // stop whenever you have enough
  cursor = page.nextCursor;
} while (cursor);

Related endpoints

• GET /us/statutes/resolve answers a citation that names a state session law rather than a code section with a sessionLaw block (matched, or ambiguous with every candidate), pointing here. It never changes resolved or section.
• GET /us/statutes/coverage lists, per jurisdiction under sessionLaws, which sessions we hold session laws for and whether each is complete or partial. Read it first: a law missing from a partial session is not evidence that it does not exist.
• Federal session laws (the Statutes at Large, SAL_ ids) are not served here. Read them with GET /us/statutes/section/{actId}.

Nulls. Every field of a response is always present: one with no value is null (or [] for a list). The examples on this page leave the nulls out for brevity. The exceptions are blocks that exist only when they apply and are OMITTED otherwise, never null: publisher, provenance and session.coverageStatus on a law, and coverage on a list page that has rows.

Rate limits. Calls count against your key’s per-minute budget like every Data API route; a 429 carries Retry-After.