Two states will not let you read your own divorce law for free.
Mississippi and Tennessee publish no free, official, state-hosted copy of their own statutes. Both hand you to a commercial publisher. We went and checked, and two states we expected to find there turned out fine.
Every page on this site traces its figures to a statute and links to it. That is only possible where the statute is readable. For most states it is: the legislature puts its own code on its own website and anyone can read it. For two states it is not, and for one of those the barrier is not a paywall but a penalty.
This is not a complaint about cost. Both Mississippi’s and Tennessee’s codes can be read on a screen without paying. The problem is narrower and worse: there is no official state-hosted copy, so there is nothing to check a figure against, nothing stable to link to, and nothing a person can download and keep.
What we found, state by state
| State | Free official state-hosted code | Where you actually land | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mississippi | No | LexisNexis, linked from the Secretary of State | Statutory penalty, minimum $1,000 per violation per day |
| Tennessee | No | LexisNexis, via a redirect into a session-parameterized container | A 2023 ruling held the publisher is outside the Public Records Act |
| Vermont | Free, but self-described as unofficial | legislature.vermont.gov | The official version is the commercial one; the free copy carries no scraping restriction we could find |
| Colorado | Yes | content.leg.colorado.gov | None material. Downloads are offered “for personal use”; republishing must be accurate and must not claim to be the official statutes |
| New York | Yes | nysenate.gov | None. Licensed for reuse including commercial use |
| California | Yes | leginfo.legislature.ca.gov | None. Free access is a statutory duty, not a courtesy |
Sources: Mississippi Secretary of State, Mississippi Law. Miss. Code § 1-1-9 and § 1-1-107. Tennessee: the state’s own free-access link, which returns HTTP 302. T.C.A. § 1-1-105 and § 1-1-111. Vermont: Vermont Statutes Online and 1 V.S.A. § 51. Colorado: Office of Legislative Legal Services and § 2-5-118, C.R.S. New York: NY Senate. California: Cal. Gov. Code § 10248. All read 29 September 2026.
Mississippi
The Secretary of State’s page on Mississippi law offers exactly one link to the Code, and it points off the state’s own domain to LexisNexis, described there as the official publisher. The Legislature’s site does not host the Code at all.
What makes Mississippi unusual is not the contract — several states have one — but what the statute claims. Miss. Code § 1-1-9 asserts state ownership over far more than the editor’s annotations. Catchlines, frontal analyses, section numbers, source lines, editor’s notes and cross references all become, in the statute’s words, the exclusive property of the State. Unlike Tennessee and Georgia, Mississippi does not concede that the bare text of a statute is uncopyrightable.
And § 1-1-9(3)(a) attaches a number to it: a civil penalty of not less than $1,000 for each violation, with each day treated as a separate violation, enforceable by the Attorney General.
What this means if you are reading Mississippi divorce law. You can read it. You cannot reliably download it, mirror it, or build anything on top of it, and the page you read it on is disallowed to automated checkers — so no tool can verify a Mississippi citation against the official source. Quote sparingly, cite the section canonically, and link rather than reproduce.
Tennessee
Tennessee has no state-hosted code either. Its agencies link out to LexisNexis, and that link returns a redirect into a session-parameterized container URL — the kind of address that is not stable and will not survive being bookmarked, let alone cited.
Tennessee’s legal position is weaker than Mississippi’s and it has been tested. T.C.A. § 1-1-111 makes the text of the Code — but expressly not the annotations and editorial matter — prima facie evidence of the statutory law. We found no Tennessee statute asserting state copyright.
But that did not produce access. In November 2023 the Tennessee Court of Appeals held that the publisher is not the functional equivalent of a governmental entity, and that the Code is exempt from public-records disclosure because Tennessee law supplies a separate, exclusive route to obtaining it. So even a winning copyright argument does not get anyone a free, current, complete copy.
The practical consequence is worse than the legal one. The Lexis interface renders through JavaScript and returns nothing to an automated reader, and the applicable terms bar robots and spiders. Any freshness monitoring for Tennessee has to be done by a person, or rely on a third-party mirror nobody can vouch for.
Vermont — free, and honest about what it is not
Vermont hosts all 33 titles at no charge on the General Assembly’s own site, currently carrying the 2025 session. It also tells you plainly, on the same page, that what you are reading is an unofficial copy provided as a convenience, and the state archives name the commercial edition as the official one.
We could find no anti-scraping or republication clause in Vermont’s disclaimers — only a warranty disclaimer and a caution that the site does not replace an official source. So Vermont belongs in a different category from Mississippi and Tennessee: the material is free and usable, and the exposure is one of status rather than access. If you cite Vermont, say that the state calls its own free copy unofficial.
Colorado — where we were wrong
We expected Colorado in the first group, and it does not belong there. The Office of Legislative Legal Services publishes the full Colorado Revised Statutes free, offering DOCX, PDF and HTM copies, alongside a bulk SGML data set of the official text. LexisNexis appears only as the printer of the paid print set.
There are conditions, and they are reasonable ones: a republication must reproduce the statutes accurately, may say it uses the official text, and may not claim to be the official statutes of the state. The download page offers the files for personal use. Since March 2016 the committee has suspended copyrighting its editorial work and suspended the fees for the statutory database.
Colorado is the best-case state in this study, and it is worth saying so as loudly as the criticism of the other two. A decade ago its copyright posture was among the most aggressive in the country. It changed.
Why any of this matters to somebody getting divorced
Almost nobody reads a statute directly. But every figure on a site like this one, every residency requirement, every waiting period and every filing fee, either came from the statute or came from somebody’s summary of it. When the statute is unreadable by machines and unstable to link to, three things follow, and all of them land on the reader.
- Nothing can be checked automatically. A site that monitors its sources for changes cannot monitor Mississippi or Tennessee. Those two states go stale silently.
- Citations rot. A container URL with a session parameter in it is not a citation. It is a link that worked once.
- Summaries compound. Where the primary source is hard to reach, everyone quotes everyone else, and an error introduced once propagates without anybody able to cheaply go back and look.
The second and third of those are why this page exists. Where we cite Mississippi or Tennessee anywhere on this site, we record the date we read it, because we cannot automate the re-reading.
How to actually read Mississippi or Tennessee divorce law without paying
- Go through the state’s own link, not a search result. Mississippi’s is on the Secretary of State’s law page; Tennessee’s is on the free-access link its agencies publish. Both are free to read.
- Cite the section, not the URL. Write it as Miss. Code Ann. § 93-5-1 or Tenn. Code Ann. § 36-4-101 and link the publisher’s entry point, never the container address you end up at.
- Use a free mirror only with a date. Third-party copies exist and carry a year label, but we could find no “current through” statement on them, so a mirror may be a full legislative session out of date without saying so.
- Ask a law library. Every state has a court or county law library, they are open to the public, and they hold the annotated print set.
Cite this · republish this
This page may be quoted and republished in full, with attribution to The Cusp and a link back. No permission needed and none of it is behind anything. If you are a law librarian or a legislative staffer and we have a state wrong, tell us and we will correct it with the date on our corrections page. Colorado is here because our own first answer was wrong and we would rather print that than quietly drop it.
Commercial republication — a brokerage, a law firm, a legal-forms company or a lead-generation site — is not covered by the above. Write to hello@thecusp.app and we will almost certainly say yes, on the same conditions, in writing.
Method: we looked, for each state, for an official government-hosted copy of the full statutory code; where the official link pointed off-domain, we followed it and recorded where it landed; and we read the code’s own provisions on official status and copyright. Six states were examined: four suspected, and New York and California as controls. Read 29 September 2026. Where we could not verify something — the Mississippi publisher’s own on-page copyright notice, which is disallowed to automated readers — we have said so rather than supplied a figure.