Search North Carolina (NC) statutes by topic or keyword
search_statutesSearch North Carolina (NC) statutes by topic, keyword or phrase.
Use this when you know the SUBJECT but not the citation — "what's the NC law about leaving a dog in a hot car", "failure to appear penalty", "when can I expunge a misdemeanor". If you already have a citation, use get_statute instead.
Returns ranked sections with highlighted fragments showing why each matched, not full text: pick the one you want and call get_statute for it.
Supports quoted "exact phrases", -excluded terms and or. match_mode says how the
query was read: "all_terms" (every word), "any_of" (the query used or), "any_terms"
(nothing matched every word, so any word was accepted) or "citation" (the query was a
bare citation, so it was looked up directly; when the section doesn't exist, the
nearest real sections by number come back as suggestions). The loose modes only
return sections that contain at least one of your words. Results are ordered by
terms_matched — how many of the search words a section contains, a quoted phrase
counting only when it appears as a phrase — then by rank. Court shorthand is expanded
automatically and case-insensitively — FTA, DWLR, PJC, AWDW and similar become the
statutory wording, because the statute book spells the phrase out and never uses the
abbreviation. The expansion is reported back as expanded_query.
Searches the law in force today, at section level. A low top rank means the corpus probably has no section on point — NC simply has no statute on some subjects, and saying so is a better answer than the nearest loose word match.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | ||
| query | Yes | Topic, keyword or phrase. Supports quoted "exact phrases", -excluded terms and `or`. Court shorthand (FTA, DWLR, PJC) is expanded for you. | |
| chapter | No | ||
| include_repealed | No |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||