JoanShear | 17 July, 2007 14:24
Question: I’m having trouble finding portions of the new Massachusetts Individual Health Coverage law on Westlaw even though he had a print out that mapped all the bill sections to their respective MGLA chapters and sections.
Answer: We went to MGLA in the stacks to verify that 111M was the name of a chapter. The spine on the volume says it goes up to 111K, but the pocket part contains additional new chapters. I explained that the capital letters are used to add new chapters between existing chapters in the code. 111M was there in the pocket part, where it stated that it won’t be in effect until July 1, 2007. [Note this question was researched in April of 2007 even though I didn't blog it until now.]
To find this on Westlaw we first went to the student’s Massachusetts tab and clicked on the “Find using a template” link under “Find by Citation”. Here we were able to just type in the chapter and section numbers, “111M” and “3”. This took us directly to that section which had a note at the top saying that this section is effective July 1, 2007.
The student asked why he had been unable to find this on Westlaw before. We tried branching down to this chapter using the Table of Contents tree. The last chapter before 112 was 111L, which has been in effect since 2005. I speculated that this chapter doesn’t show up in the tree because it isn’t in effect yet, and that we should check it again on July 1, 2007, to see if it shows up that day.
The student tried to use the “Find by Citation” method using the format we had discovered using the template to find “mgla 111M s 2b”, but got the result “We cannot process this FIND request because this citation may contain incorrect information or because the document is not available on Westlaw.” I had him remove the lower case b from the request and he was rewarded with two different future versions of this section, one that will be effective from July 01, 2007 to December 31, 2007, and one that will be effective January 01, 2008. It seems the lower case b refers to a subsection, rather than an intervening section.
So my new general rule when looking up a statute by citation on Westlaw is to include capital letters, but not those in lower case.
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