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Tips for using these resources

Looking at laws and bills

Because of the wide variety of methods states employ to provide information on their own sites, as well as to copyright protections invoked by some states, some links provided here take you directly to the text of laws while others take you to a search engine.

Use ignition interlock as the search term when necessary. You may have to try just interlock or ignition. Or, like in Texas, interlock device.

If your results include a lot of "hits" that include just ignition (i.e., material about explosives, engine ignition, etc.) or just interlock i.e., material about firearms) try the search again and put quotation marks around the two words. Or try putting AND between them. One state requires square brackets around them. Search engines sometimes offer choices for how ignition interlock should be interpreted. For instance, whether any of the words need to be in the resulting material or that they should be considered as an exact phrase. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you tell a search engine and you will have to wade through extraneous material to find what you want.

You may need to have cookies and/or javascript enabled on your computer to get results from some links provided here. See your browser's Help file.

When using a link from the state law page, you may have to look around on the resulting page to find a place to do a text search. You may also have to select a legislative session to search. Some states provide access to all laws or bills in one place, others separate bills, for instance, into categories by year.

Some state's have the search terms already highlighted when you open a law or bill document, some don't. For those that don't, use your browser's Find or Search function (found in varying places in different browsers, usually under the Edit menu.)

The fact that a bill contains the search term of ignition interlock does not necessarily mean that the bill will change existing ignition interlock laws. Bill text provided online often includes the entire text of a law section but the changes may be to parts of the law section that do not relate to ignition interlock systems.

 

Google Tool Bar

A very useful tool for Internet Explorer is your own personal Google tool bar that can be used with your browser (download here).

It allows you to search either the whole web or the current site.

Once you have found a document, the Google tool bar can

The only problem is that many large sites are actually subdivided into separate "sites". For these, which you will only find by exploring, try searching the state's official site, the general legislature site, etc.

 

pdf files

PDF files (filename.pdf) are "portable document files" requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader (download here). Many of the links provided here are to pdf files. Adobe Acrobat Reader will usually load into your browser by itself when you click on a link to a pdf file.

Use Adobe Acrobat Reader's own Find and Find Again functions as shown below.

Adobe Acrobat Reader
 

Find

Find Again

Buttons

Keys

Ctrl+F

Ctrl+G

Menu

Edit>Find

Edit>Find Again

NOTE: When you have a pdf file open inside your browser, make sure you are using Adobe Acrobat Reader's Find function instead of your browser's. It's easy to forget and using the wrong Find will get you nowhere.

 

.rtf Files

RTF files (filename.rtf) are "rich text format" files viewed with most major word processors. RTF files need to be downloaded and saved to your hard drive to be viewed.