See the Cornell Legal Information Institute’s Introduction to Basic Legal Citation, by Peter W. Martin.

The New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated

New Hampshire’s Revised Statutes Annotated (RSAs) are all available online.

The RSAs are divided into titles, chapters, sections, and various degrees of subsections. An RSA is typically cited by chapter and section number, for example, RSA 123:4. This can be read aloud as “R. S. A. one-twenty-three colon four.”

Titles are labeled serially with capital Roman numerals, for example, Title XXI.

Chapters are labeled serially with Arabic numerals, starting at 1; the numbers do not reset at the beginning of each title. Sections are also labeled in the same manner, but they restart at 1 within each chapter. For example, Title I starts with RSA 1:1, and Title II starts with RSA 22:1.

Newly inserted chapters are labeled with Arabic numerals followed by a hyphen and a capital letter, starting with A. For example, a new chapter inserted between RSA 123 and 124 would be labeled 123-A. Additional inserted chapters would be labeled 123-B, 123-C, and so on. If more than twenty-six sections are inserted, the letters are doubled up, for example, 123-AA, 123-BB, and so on. This is rare in practice.

Inserted sections are labeled similarly, but with lowercase letters, for example, a new section between 123:45 and 123:46 would be labeled 123:45-a.

Subsections, when present, are numbered using capital Roman numerals. Inserted subsections, like sections, use appended lowercase letters. A citation including a subsection is written with a comma and space after the section number, for example, RSA 123:45, I. This would be read aloud as “R. S. A. one-twenty-three colon forty-five, Roman one.”

Deeper levels of subsections are usually labelled with lowercase letters in parentheses, followed by Arabic numerals, then capital letters. This mirrors the United States Code style to some extent. An example of a very deep citation might be RSA 123:45, I(a)(1)(A). These are quite rare in practice.

A few titles have peculiar numbering schemes, for example RSA 382-A, the Uniform Commercial Code. New Hampshire seems to have taken the entire UCC, which is divided into “articles” and “sections,” and just made them all sections of RSA 382-A. For example, section 2-207 of the UCC became RSA 382-A:2-207. Subsections follow the official UCC numbering scheme.

RSAs are properly called “statutes,” not “laws.” Each year, all bills passed into law by the Legislature are renumbered serially in the order in which they are passed, and compiled into a volume known as the Laws of [year]. These are typically referred to as “chaptered law.” For example, if HB123 of 2010 is the 456th bill to be passed, that becomes chapter 456 of the Laws of 2010. Section 1 of such a bill, as chaptered law, would be cited as 2010, 456:1.

This bit of arcana is useful in decyphering the source lines listed under each section of the RSAs. For example, here is the source line from RSA 644:2, disorderly conduct: “1971, 518:1. 1983, 200:1. 1985, 309:1. 2005, 192:1, 2, eff. June 30, 2005; 260:2, 3, eff. July 22, 2005.”

What this means is that this statute has been amended by chapter 518, section 1 of the Laws of 1971, section 200:1 of the Laws of 1983, section 309:1 of the Laws of 1985, section 192:1 of the Laws of 2005, sections 192:1 and 192:2 of the Laws of 2005, and finally sections 260:2 and 260:3 of the Laws 2005. The dates, which are often omitted, are the dates that such laws became effective.

Statutes that predate the RSAs often have citations in the source line that will point back to earlier collections of New Hampshire statutes, labelled things like PL, GL, RS, and others. RSAs that were moved, renumbered, or consolidated will often have the older RSA numbers listed in the source line.

The New Hampshire Legislature’s bill status search can be used to look up chaptered law going back to 1988.