List a state's session laws

List the session laws of one state: every act its legislature enacted, filtered by session, approval date or effective date. This is how you ask “what became law in Texas this session”, “what was signed in April” or “what takes effect on September 1, 2025”, and how you turn the answer into sessionLawIds for the get and body endpoints. A session law is the act as enacted, before it is folded into a code; v1 serves STATE acts.

Cost: 1 credit per page of up to 200 rows (default 50), however many rows the page holds. An empty page is an answer and is charged when it means nothing matches your filters. A request that fails validation (422) is never charged; a failure on our side (500, 503) is refunded.

Empty pages. A page with no rows carries coverage, what we hold of the session you named (or of the state, when you named none), so you can tell “nothing matches” from “we have not collected this”. coverage.status is complete (we hold every law the publisher lists for it: the empty page is a true negative, and it is charged), partial (the collection stopped short, so the law you want may exist) or not_held (we hold nothing of it). On partial and not_held the page is NOT charged and creditsConsumed is 0: we do not bill an empty answer that may be our gap. The one exception is a request that names only the state, where some sessions we hold are complete and some partial: the page is charged, since for the complete ones it is a true negative, and coverage.partialSessions names the sessions to doubt (send one as session to ask about it alone). If coverage cannot be read the page is charged as before and coverage is omitted.

Filters. jurisdiction is required and scopes everything; the rest narrow it and combine with AND. A value that is malformed is a 422, and so is a range whose end is before its start (approvedTo before approvedFrom, effectiveTo before effectiveFrom). A value that is well formed and matches nothing (an unknown session, a date range with no laws) is a 200 with results: []. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD.

• Everything from one session: session (2025R, 2025S1).
• Approved in a window: approvedFrom / approvedTo.
• Taking effect in a window: effectiveFrom / effectiveTo. For one day send the same date to both. This matches laws whose first-to-last effective dates overlap your window, so read effectiveFirst and effectiveLast on each row and effectiveDates on the law. A law with no held effective date (not every state prints them) never matches.
• Narrow by series, instrumentType, hasText or textStatus.
• What became law and what did not: isLaw (false for the vetoed and pocket-vetoed measures; a measure whose outcome does not settle it has a null isLaw and matches neither value) and enactmentOutcome, repeated for several outcomes (enactmentOutcome=vetoed&enactmentOutcome=pocket_veto).
• A sync job: updatedSince returns the laws whose record changed on or after a date (midnight UTC, by updatedAt), so a job that stores its last run pulls only what is new or corrected.
• Find by words: q, a case-insensitive substring of the title or the bill number as the publisher prints it (3 to 100 characters). It is a substring match inside one state, not a search engine.
• A derived approval date (approvedDateDerived: true) is not matched by approvedFrom and approvedTo, which read the registry’s own approval date.

Paging. Rows come in session.code order, then sessionLawId, both as TEXT in the database’s collation, not in chapter order: ..._C10 sorts before ..._C2, and the id’s series and numbering-year segments sort before the chapter. Sort client-side by number if you need chapter order. The order is the same on every page and for every filter, so a cursor never skips or repeats a row. Send nextCursor back as cursor, with the same filters, while hasMore is true (a cursor sent with different filters is a 422, cursor_query_mismatch: restart without it). The cursor is a keyset (it names the last row you saw), so laws added between your calls never repeat or skip a row you have passed. count is the size of this page, never a total.

Text. Rows include laws whose text we do not hold (textStatus: not_held) or hold and withhold (withheld, with withheldReason): the row is still a real law. Pass hasText=true for just the laws /{sessionLawId}/body will serve. A row is the summary only: the full dates, sources and code sections are on GET /us/session-laws/{sessionLawId}. Each row carries charCount and estimatedBodyPages, so you can price reading a law before you open it. citableAs is the law cited the way a lawyer writes it (Minn. Laws 2025, ch. 1), and licenseNote says what its licence class permits.

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.

Example

curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/list?jurisdiction=tx&effectiveFrom=2025-09-01&effectiveTo=2025-09-01&limit=25" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

# only what changed since your last sync, and only measures that did not become law
curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/list?jurisdiction=mn&updatedSince=2026-10-01" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"
curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/list?jurisdiction=mn&isLaw=false&enactmentOutcome=vetoed&enactmentOutcome=pocket_veto" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

# find by words in the title or the printed bill number
curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/list?jurisdiction=mn&q=court%20fees" -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

const url = new URL("https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/list");
url.search = new URLSearchParams({ jurisdiction: "mn", session: "2025R" });
const res = await fetch(url, {
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.VAQUILL_API_KEY}` },
});
const { results, nextCursor, hasMore } = await res.json();

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.