Full Text Search

The LegiScan search engine not only indexes the entire text of each of the approximately 175,000 bills introduced annually, but also maintains relative document structure ordering to allow for more advanced proximity based searches. And if searching for a specific bill number, be sure to read about bill numbers caveats.

Example Executable Searches

For more examples try the Top 50 Searches trending recently.

• vaccination
  • Simple word search for bills dealing with vaccination
• transgender OR gender
  • Legislative texts that include either gender or transgender anywhere in the document
• election AND ballot
  • Legislative texts that include both election and ballot anywhere in the document
• personal ADJ property ADJ tax
  • Bills relevant and affecting personal property tax
• hemp OR cannabis OR marijuana
  • Match legislation containing any of the words hemp, cannabis or marijuana
• abortion OR (pregnancy NEAR termination)
  • Legislation relating to abortion and pregnancy termination
• "National Popular Vote"
  • Generally concerned with the National Popular Vote interstate compact
• ((reform OR repeal) AND "Affordable Care Act") AND (exchange OR connector OR benefit OR Medicaid) AND (health care)
  • Search-Fu concerning ACA/Medicaid reforms to exchanges and benefits
• status:introduced AND (alternative ADJ fuel)
  • Find introduced alternative fuel legislation
• type:B AND status:passed
  • All bills affecting code statutes and law that have successfully passed
• action:month AND mask
  • All bills concerning masks that have had activity this month
• intro:week
  • All bills that have been introduced this week

Text Search Tips

• By default simple word search without modifiers will return matches for all of the terms with relative statistical weighting (default: AND)

• General:

  • Quotes: A phrase surrounded with double quotes ("") matches documents containing that exact phrase
  • Parentheses: Control the precedence of boolean logic operators. Ex: (one OR two) AND three
  • Wildcards: Unless quoted all expressions apply natural language processing to match alternative roots and stems, wild card matching is not needed or supported
  • Prefixes: Are atomic expressions so to combine multiple values they should be listed separately. Ex: type:R OR type:CR OR type:JR

• Logic Operators:

  • AND expression AND expression matches documents which are matched by both of the subexpressions
  • OR expression OR expression matches documents which are matched by either of the subexpressions
  • NOT expression NOT expression matches documents which are matched by only the first subexpression
  • + / - A group of terms with some marked with + and - will match documents containing all of the + terms, but none of the - terms

• Proximity Operators:

  • ADJ term ADJ term matches if the terms appear in the same order and close proximity to one another
  • NEAR term NEAR term matches if the terms appear in any order and close proximity to one another

• Meta filters:

  • status: filters documents with specific progress status. Ex: status:passed
  • chamber: filters documents that originated from the specified chamber. Ex: chamber:S
  • type: matches documents that are of the specified bill type. Ex: type:B
  • intro: filters documents that were introduced on a specific date. Ex: intro:20220101..20220115
  • action: filters documents that had last action on a specific date. Ex: action:yesterday

Prefix Value Notes

• The status: prefix accepts the following values: introduced, engrossed, enrolled, passed, failed, vetoed
• The chamber: prefix accepts the following values: S, H, A (Senate, House, Assembly)
• The type: prefix accepts the following values: B, R, CR, JR, CA (Bill, Resolution, Concurrent Resolution, Joint Resolution, Constitutional Amendment)
• The intro: prefix accepts the following values: today, yesterday, week, month, year which are dynamic placeholders appropriate for saved searches, as well as static values for a specific date YYYYMMDD or date range YYYYMMDD..YYYYMMDD
• The action: prefix accepts the following values: today, yesterday, week, month, year which are dynamic placeholders appropriate for saved searches, as well as static values for a specific date YYYYMMDD or date range YYYYMMDD..YYYYMMDD

Date Value Notes

• Date information is controlled by each individual state and the values are not always as expected
• action: dates may be in the future reflecting an upcoming hearing or in the past from a data entry and publishing lag by the state
• intro: dates may be in the future by weeks or months in prefiling states, notably Alabama and Oklahoma which date the as the first day of session
• Dates operate the context of the Current / Recent / Prior /All session sets, so using a five year old date with Current data will return an empty result