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.

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, where 28,529 of 29,775 characters are commentary.

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. Pass format=content to skip plain/html on the wire entirely.

⚠️ 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”.

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.

This is the question behind every compliance diff and every historical citation: what did this say when we last reviewed it. Answering it previously required holding a board watch and reading the alert diff, so the historical text existed but was reachable only through the alerts product.

It is a reconstruction, not an archive, and the response says so in structured form rather than in a footnote. 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. The asOf block reports:

• source — live (nothing captured after your date, so today’s text stood then), reconstructed, or unavailable
• 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. 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.

html is never returned on this path: the reconstructed 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. A section we know changed but cannot rebuild returns source: "unavailable" and is refunded.