Upon completing this State Statutes unit, you will be able to:
- Explain the legislative process and stages of publication of a South Carolina statute;
- Use a South Carolina statute's history line to identify the law that enacted it, when it was amended, and its location in previous codes;
- Find South Carolina bills, session laws, and statutes;
- Describe how the S.C. Code Annotated is organized topically by title, chapter, and section and recognize that other state codes may be arranged differently;
- Find state statutes by citation, by popular name, and by subject using an index;
- Construct keyword searches to find state statutes in online databases;
- Use a table of contents to find related state statutes and to evaluate the overall statutory scheme;
- Find relevant procedural and court rules and provisions of the South Carolina Constitution using the S.C. Code Annotated;
- Use state annotated codes to find references to related statutes and regulations as well as relevant cases and secondary sources;
- Describe the process of updating state statutes using pocketparts, paper supplements, free Internet sources and commercial databases;
- Use citators to identify pending legislation, recent amendments, or the repeal of a statute as well as to find relevant cases and secondary sources that have cited a state statute;
- Interpret the flags and signals used by the major citators to update state statutes;
- Cite state statutes using the Bluebook and local court rules; and
- Analyze a state statute and determine its relevancy to a particular legal issue in the context of a specific set of facts.
