Get Section History
get_section_historyThe amendment record for a single provision: what changed, which Act changed it, which of that Act's sections did so, when it took effect where the publisher records a date, and the wording it replaced where the publisher quotes it.
Cost: 2 credits. An empty history for a provision we hold IS the answer and
is charged; the coverage block tells you whether it is empty because nothing
changed or because we hold no parsed record.
Read appliedStatus on every event. It is not_applied throughout, because
the text this API serves is the publisher's published text and we do not edit
it. That is a deliberate, stated position rather than an omission: you should
never have to infer currency from silence.
asOf returns a TIMELINE, not text. We hold amendment events and no
versioned text, so there is no honest way to render this provision as it stood
on a date. Passing asOf tells you how many recorded amendments had taken
effect by then, how many had not, and how many carry no date at all. isBounded
true means we hold no recorded event affecting that date, which is not the same
as there having been none.
Coverage is real and uneven: many acts carry a non-zero amendment count with no
parseable footnote behind it, and about half the records we do hold carry no
effective date. Read the coverage block on this response for the provision you
asked about, and the free GET /acts/coverage for the corpus-wide split
(depth.actsWithAmendmentEvents against
depth.actsClaimingAmendmentsWithoutEvents).
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| asOf | No | Split the recorded amendments around a date (YYYY-MM-DD). Returns a timeline, never reconstructed text. | |
| limit | No | Events per page. | |
| act_id | Yes | Section identifier, e.g. `USC_T42_C21_S1983` (Title 42, Chapter 21, Section 1983, written 42 U.S.C. 1983). Take it from a search result rather than assembling it: the title and section are derivable from a citation but the CHAPTER is not, so hand-built ids usually 404. | |
| offset | No | Zero-based offset. | |
| section_number | Yes | Section number exactly as the publisher writes it. Alphanumeric suffixes are part of the number, not a sub-provision: `498A` is one section, not section 498 clause A. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||