NC Statutes Table of Contents 2019
The General Statutes of North Carolina is the official North Carolina legal code, a collection of the statewide laws in force at the time of publication regardless of when they originally became law.
Two versions of the Statutes are in print (Lexis and West are the publishers) but only the set produced by Lexis is considered the "official version of the Statutes". An easy way to tell if you are using the "official version" is to check the beginning pages of the volume. Each print volume of the official version has a message written by the North Carolina General Assembly Legislative Services Office stating that those general statutes were published under its supervision.
The print versions of the Statutes are annotated with notes to the statutes added by the editors The annotations are usually about cases that have interpreted a statute, but sometimes the editors add notes that add to the general understanding of the statute.
A new edition of the General Statutes of North Carolina Annotated is published every two years on the odd-numbered year, with interim supplements issued during the even-numbered years to reflect any new statutes or amendments to current statutes that occur in between new editions.
Digital versions of the Statutes are available on the General Assembly web site. It is important to note that the digital version, even though it is posted on the General Assembly website, is not the official version and does not include annotations.
How the Statutes are Organized
The Statutes are arranged into chapters and each chapter has a broad topic. For example, chapter 20 is Motor Vehicles and chapter 125 is Libraries, and so on. Each chapter is broken into articles and the articles have sections. Usually you need a chapter and section number to find a statute. For example G.S. 20-1 is General Statute 20 (Motor Vehicle), Section 1 (Division of Motor Vehicles established).
Each section has the law and a history note (a list of every time the statute has appeared or been altered by the General Assembly, every section of the statutes has a history note, whether it’s in print or online) sometimes called the session law history. That’s a list of every time the statute has appeared or been altered by the General Assembly, usually by a session law. Every single section of the statutes has a history note, whether it’s in print or online.
How to find a current statute (video tutorial from the NC Legislative Library) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y2-UAAZcxEZap63tupu2Kx1QbWolx20o/view
Print: 1943 to current (call number: Z1: 1)
Digital: Current Statutes: https://www.ncleg.gov/Laws/GeneralStatutes
Digitized: NC General Statutes (Superseded 1821 forward - WORK IN PROGRESS)
https://ncleg.gov/Documents/1/12201