Get statute full text

Get the full text of a statute section in HTML and plain text.

Cost: 6 credits. You are only charged when text is returned: not-found (404), failed fetches, and sections whose text is not yet ingested (available: false) are all refunded.

Works across USC, CFR, and state corpora. The text preserves formatting, cross-references, and paragraph numbering as published in the official source.

Response: available: true with html + plain, or available: false with a note and creditsConsumed: 0 when the full text is not yet ingested (metadata is still available from /us/statutes/section/{actId}).

sourceUrl is where the government published this text: cite and verify against that, not against source, which names our storage backend. It is null when we hold no official link for the section; we never substitute a third-party compiler.

Tables and figures (markdown / tables / figures)

Where a section has a structured rendering, source is r2_render and the body keeps what a flat text extraction loses: tables as real tables and images at the position the publisher prints them.

• html — <table> elements with <caption>, colspan and rowspan, and <figure> / <img> elements whose images are hosted on statutes-us.vaquill.ai
• markdown — GitHub-flavoured Markdown, tables as pipe tables and figures as ![alt](url)
• plain — tables as one tab-separated line per row, figures as [Figure N: caption] placeholders
• tables / figures — what the body contains, in document order. Each figure carries its hosted url and its offset into markdown and plain, so you can place images in your own layout. A figure we could not fetch is listed with status: "unavailable" and keeps its caption in the text.
• hasTables / hasFigures — quick flags

A section in a covered corpus that has no table and no figure returns tables: [], figures: [] and both flags false, with its text in html and plain as before. Where a corpus has no structured rendering yet, those fields are null, meaning “not known”, not “none”: a table may still be present in html. markdown is returned only for format=all or format=markdown: the default format=both leaves it out, because it is a third full copy of the text. format=markdown returns only markdown, and falls back to plain with a note when the section has no structured rendering. The price is the same whichever format you ask for.

Telling the law from the apparatus (content / sourceCredit / notes)

plain and html are the WHOLE body as the publisher prints it: the operative text, then the source credit, then the notes apparatus (historical and revision notes, committee reports, editorial notes, amendments, effective-date notes).

For United States Code sections that body is mostly not the law: measured 2026-09-02, the operative text is a median 46% of it across USC, and as little as 3.4% on 17 U.S.C. § 107.

So the granule is split into three additional fields, using the field delimiters GPO publishes in the source:

• content — the operative text, and nothing else
• sourceCredit — the credit line, e.g. (Pub. L. 94-553, ...)
• notes — the apparatus, kept because it is the legislative history

Use content if you are feeding sections to a model: the full body invites it to quote a 1992 amendment note as the law in force.

Two format values act on the split, and the difference between them is how many bytes cross the wire, not what the law says:

• format=content drops plain/html and returns all three split fields. The apparatus is still on the response, because for a legislative-history or effective-date question it IS the answer.
• format=operative drops notes as well, returning content + sourceCredit and nothing else. Measured on 17 U.S.C. § 107: 95,217 bytes at both, 61,003 at plain, 30,545 at content, 1,564 at operative. Same 6 credits either way — the fetch is identical, so this buys bandwidth and prompt budget, not a discount.

Reach for operative when you are putting the law in front of a model or a reader and the notes are noise. Reach for content when you may need to read the apparatus but want to keep it clearly separated from the law.

⚠️ USC only. CFR and the state corpora carry no equivalent structure in their sources, so all three fields are null there and plain remains the whole body. Null means “we cannot split this reliably”, never “this section is empty”. Both content and operative fall back to serving plain with an explanatory note on a corpus that cannot be split, rather than returning a response that claims to carry the text and does not.

Pass structured=true to also get markdown (the body as nested Markdown lists) and subsections (a tree you can address by pincite, e.g. (b)(2), each node carrying its pincite path and full pinpoint citation). Same cost.

Point-in-time (asOf)

Pass asOf=YYYY-MM-DD to get the text as it stood on that date instead of today’s. Same cost.

One parameter, two engines, and asOf.engine says which one answered. Read it before anything else in the block, because the two make different promises and isBounded does not mean the same thing under each.

engine: "stored_edition" — we hold the publisher’s own printed editions for this corpus and return one verbatim. CFR annual editions, the US Code, the Copyright Compendium and OFAC FAQs. Here isBounded: true means your date fell inside an edition we actually hold, which is a verified published printing.

Coverage under this engine is ENUMERATED, not continuous, and outside the CFR annual editions it is currently sparse. A date in a gap between two held editions returns source: "unavailable", isBounded: false, no text, and an outOfCoverageReason naming what we do hold. It is never answered from a neighbouring edition, because the text may have changed in the gap. For the US Code this is the common case today: most historical dates fall between the editions we hold and are reported out of coverage, with outOfCoverageReason naming the editions that are available. Do not read the presence of this parameter as full US Code point-in-time coverage.

engine: "observed_change" — every other corpus. A reconstruction, not an archive. The corpus holds one current text per citation; an earlier one is rebuilt from the before-side of the first change we OBSERVED after your date, through the same resolver the watch diff uses. Here isBounded: true is the WEAK claim, described below.

The asOf block reports:

• source — on observed_change: live (nothing captured after your date, so today’s text stood then), reconstructed, or unavailable. On stored_edition: published or unavailable
• outOfCoverageReason — why no text came back, when none did
• basisChangeId — the change event this answer rests on, readable at /us/statutes/section/{actId}/changes
• observedFrom — how far back the evidence reaches for this section
• isBounded — read this one, and read engine first. On observed_change, true means we observed no change affecting your date, which is not the same as there having been none: capture began long after the corpus did and is per-source. On stored_edition it is inverted and stronger, as above: true means a held edition governed your date.

html is never returned on this path: the text is plain, and synthesising markup the publisher never printed would be a wrong answer on the endpoint whose job is fidelity.

A section that did not exist on that date returns available: false with asOf.existed: false and IS charged, the same way an unresolved citation is charged on /resolve: a confident negative is the answer. On observed_change, a section we know changed but cannot rebuild returns source: "unavailable" and is refunded. On stored_edition, an out-of-coverage date is an ANSWER about what we hold and is charged, which is the same rule the CFR annual editions have always followed.