The North Carolina General Assembly website contains searchable and downloadable Session Laws (enactments of the General Assembly in chronological order) at http://ncleg.net/gascripts/EnactedLegislation/ELTOC.pl?sType=Law
From 1959 through 1982 only LOCAL laws are included (those applicable in less than 15 counties), because they had be manually typed in and proofread when we buolt our electronic database in 1987. Most public laws are eventually codified in our General Statutes and available in a subject matter database http://ncleg.net/gascripts/statutes/Statutes.asp and local laws were a higher priority online need for legislative drafters, researchers and municipal and county attorneys and staff. From 1983 forward we have ALL Session Laws, public and local in our Session Laws database.
In 2008 after we added the 1959 local acts we stopped the manual process of adding older laws as digitzation of old books seemed on the horizon. Now, we’ve gotten to the horizon as a library digitization projects conclude.
Between now and July of 2012 we’ll start processing the digitized 1008 public laws from 1981 and 1982 to add to the 392 local acts from that biennium in the database. While we will not be adding any large group of local acts pre-1959 until we get all the public laws online back to then, we are exploring adding several old city charters from Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and Asheville for historical reference purposes.
see http://ncbilldrafting.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/whats-a-city-charter-and-why-is-it-so-old/ the 25 largest municipalities all have charters enacted since 1958 which means they are already in our database. Missing? Three big ones:
Raleigh: Chapter 1184, Session Laws of 1949, April 23, 1949.
Winston-Salem: Chapter 232, Private Laws of 1927, March 3, 1927.
Asheville: Chapter 16, Private Laws of 1923, January 26, 1923, and Chapter 121, Private Laws of 1931, March 30, 1931. The 1931 charter revisal was not a complete consolidation, it enacted new material as well as repealing parts and reenacting parts of the 1923 charter simply by referring to section numbers of the 1923 act, so both documents must still be consulted.
Posted by gercohen 
