The legislature will often draft a general statute and delegate to the relevant administrative agency the authority to issue regulations (sometimes referred to as "rules") to address specific issues not covered in the statute. In addition to these substantive regulations, agencies will also often issue "interpretive" regulations in which they indicate how certain statutory provisions should be applied in different situations.
Regulations that are currently in force are published in regulatory codes, which are organized by subject. There is a regulatory code for federal regulations as well as one for each state (sometimes referred to as an administrative code).
Searching for regulations is generally similar to searching for statutes. With the exception of the "Popular Name Table" search tool, the tools/ techniques discussed in this guide in the Statutory Research: Finding Relevant Code Sections box also can be applied to searching the regulatory codes. Regulatory codes, like statutory codes, have print and online indexes. Keyword searching and table of contents browsing also work similarly for regulations as for statutes. Additionally, some of the platforms that include 50 state statutory surveys also include 50 state regulatory surveys.
One additional way of finding regulations is to review the statutory annotations to see if any related regulations are identified. As regulations often supplement statutes, regulatory citations are commonly found in the history notes and annotations for statutes.
As with both statutes and cases, you need to validate your research to confirm that your regulation is still good law. The citators -- KeyCite in Westlaw and Shepard's in Lexis -- can be used to validate regulations just as they are used for statutes. See the box in this guide on Statutory Research: Validating Your Research for more information.
For additional information on researching regulations and other administrative materials, please see the Law Library's Federal Administrative Law and California Administrative Law research guides.
