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The purpose of this guide is to outline the steps a researcher must take to determine where (i.e., which state) a specific Nevada statute came from. Determining a statute's derivation or origin is important for statutory interpretation when there are no Nevada Supreme Court or Court of Appeals opinions that have previously examined the statute. This guide describes how to take a statutory history note and research backward to determine the origin of the statute.
The Legislative Counsel Bureau's Preface to the NRS is invaluable in performing statutory derivation research, and includes many examples of how to interpret the different variations of statutory history notes.
When looking at a current statute in Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS), the statute's history note tells you where it came from. Sometimes all of the information is in parentheses. In this situation, the statute you're looking at was added to the NRS on or after it was created in 1957. Here' an example:
(Added to NRS by 1973, 567; A 1977, 1519; 1981, 132; 1989, 933; 2021, 1031)
This is the history note for NRS 278A.110. It was added to the NRS in 1973 and it has been amended four times: 1977, 1981, 1989, and 2021.
However, if the statutory history note includes information in brackets as well as parentheses, this statute existed before the NRS, and perhaps was modeled after a statute from another jurisdiction. Here's an example:
[33:169:1917; A 1945, 80; 1943 NCL § 5354] — (NRS A 1979, 1799)
This is the statutory history note for NRS 403.570. It became a Nevada statute in 1917, derived from Section 33 of Chapter 169 in the Statutes of Nevada. It was amended in 1945 (and the amendment can be found on page 80 of the 1945 Statues of Nevada), and that amendment appeared as Section 5354 of the 1943-1949 Supplement to the Nevada Compiled Laws. Then the parentheses indicate the statute's changes as represented in the current NRS. It was amended once in 1979 (and the amendment can be found on page 1799 of the Statutes of Nevada).