Illinois Compiled Statutes
| Editor | Illinois Legislative Reference Bureau |
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The Illinois Compiled Statutes (ILCS) are the codified statutes of a general and permanent nature of Illinois. The compilation organizes the general Acts of Illinois into 67 chapters arranged within 9 major topic areas. The Illinois Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) makes additions, deletions, and changes to ILCS (for example, when new acts become law or existing acts are repealed) by filing documents as provided in Public Act 87-1005.
The compilation is an official compilation by the state and is entirely in the public domain for purposes of federal copyright law; anyone may publish the statutes. There is no official version of the ILCS, but there are several unofficial versions: Illinois State Bar Association's/West's Illinois Compiled Statutes, West's Smith–Hurd Illinois Compiled Statutes Annotated, and LexisNexis's Illinois Compiled Statutes Annotated.
Illinois officially revised its laws in 1827-29, 1833, 1845, and 1874. In those revisions, bills were passed arranging the laws as alphabetical chapters. (The 1819 session laws can also be considered a revision of the laws in some respects.) Over time, the alphabetical arrangement of the 1874 Illinois Revised Statutes became less useful as some chapters had become huge, unwieldy, and disorganized by the addition of new acts. The Illinois Supreme Court, among others, had pointed out the confusion caused by the poor organization of the outdated Illinois Revised Statutes, and in its 1988 and 1989 annual reports to the General Assembly recommended consideration of recodification.
The 1874 Illinois Revised Statutes were an official arrangement of the statutes by the state in Illinois, but the state did not maintain the organizational scheme. When a new act became law and needed to be placed within the framework of the Illinois Revised Statutes, that task was left to private publishers, but the publishers were not consistent. One publisher might place a new act in one chapter and another publisher place the same new act in another chapter, and even if two publishers placed the act in the same chapter, they each might assign different paragraph numbers. To solve the confusion and decrease the expense to its members, the Illinois State Bar Association decided in the 1930s to endorse the edition of a single publisher and to encourage all of its members to use only that edition. The Bar Association's endorsement solved those problems, but it created another problem: a single publisher making editorial decisions as to where to place new acts in the chapters of the Illinois Revised Statutes allowed that publisher to assert a copyright interest in the arrangement of the Illinois Revised Statutes and to effectively prevent other publishers from entering the market. That publisher was West Publishing Company. Moreover, because the state had not maintained the organization and numbering of the Illinois Revised Statutes, it was an unofficial compilation of the statutes.
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