Illinois law rides on a paper trail that is easy to lose. We rebuilt it — receipt by receipt.
Every binding sentence in the Illinois Compiled Statutes got there the same way: a bill moved through Springfield, became a Public Act, and was compiled into the code. The statute’s source note compresses that whole journey into a cryptic fragment like “P.A. 95-994, eff. 10-3-08.” LawEngine rebuilt the journey itself, from official Illinois General Assembly sources — so a lawyer can walk from the bill to the Act to the exact section of current law, with evidence at every hop.
163,006
Illinois bills & resolutions, GA93–GA104
2,103,427
recorded official legislative actions
88,962
version-level links from Public Acts into the statutes
Counts are live database figures as of July 24, 2026, built from official ILGA bill-status, document, and Public Act sources. This is provenance work, not prediction — and wherever a trail reaches current law, its quotable endpoint is one of the 65,455 current, operative ILCS section authorities LawEngine treats as quotable law.
The problem
A statute tells you what the law says. It barely whispers where it came from.
When the answer to “why does the law read this way?” matters — in litigation over legislative intent, in tracing when a duty first attached, in checking whether a just-passed Act has reached the compiled code yet — the source note is where most research tools stop. The paper trail behind it lives in scattered official records: bill-status pages, engrossed and enrolled prints, Public Act files, effective-date clauses.
So we collected the records themselves. As of July 24, 2026, LawEngine holds 163,006 Illinois bills and resolutions across twelve General Assemblies (GA93–GA104, 2003 to present) with official bill-status evidence; 2,103,427 recorded official actions; 241,724 official bill documents preserved as roughly 58.6 million lines of source text; 348,217 bill-to-statute reference rows; and 41,226 Illinois Public Act identity records, 12,784 of them carrying full parsed body text from official ILGA sources through P.A. 104-0579. Alias resolution — 224,429 identifier aliases — means “P.A. 104-3,” “104-0003,” and “Public Act 104-0003” resolve to the same Act instead of three different dead ends.
Walk one trail
From SB 2400 to the biometric privacy law the whole country knows.
Take BIPA — the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. In LawEngine, the trail is three linked records, each backed by official evidence:
1 · The bill
SB 2400 · 95th General Assembly
Official ILGA bill-status evidence, through the final action of October 3, 2008: “Public Act . . . 95-0994.”
2 · The Act
P.A. 95-994 · effective Oct. 3, 2008
The bill–Act bridge holds on two independent evidence kinds — the bill-status action and the source-law alias — not on one string match.
3 · The law
740 ILCS 14/15
BIPA’s retention-and-destruction section, whose current version links back to P.A. 95-994 through its compiled source note — the quotable endpoint of the trail.
Every hop in that chain is a real database row built from an official record. Not a summary of the trail — the trail.
The part that earns trust
When Illinois’s own records disagree, we keep the disagreement.
Effective dates are where legislative history quietly goes wrong. Public Act files contain effective clauses, older Act references, recodification language, and date-shaped fragments that are easy to flatten into a confident wrong answer. We built the pipeline to refuse.
A worked example from our records, as observed May 18, 2026: the body of P.A. 104-0160states it takes effect July 1, 2025 — but official ILGA metadata records the Governor’s approval on August 14, 2025, yielding multiple candidate effective dates. LawEngine stored that as what it is: a conflict in the official sources, flagged for review — not silently resolved to whichever date looked best. Illinois law itself (5 ILCS 75/1, 75/2) supplies the rule for which date controls; the point is that the evidence stays visible while the rule is applied.
The same discipline runs the whole trail: effective dates are promoted only from trusted evidence — thousands of older provisions simply do not have complete section-level effective dates in the official record, and we say so rather than invent them. Bills and Public Acts are treated as evidence; only the current compiled ILCS endpoint is presented as quotable law.
Use it
Live today, and honest about what isn’t.
In LawEngine’s live Illinois research surface, exact Public Act and source-law provenance questions and exact bill-status lookups route through this evidence, refreshed on an automated schedule from official ILGA sources — and the Illinois statute lane answers as-of-date questions with honest refusals when the evidence does not support a date. What this is not, yet: a general bill-search product. Broad semantic search over bill text, sponsor analytics, votes, and hearing calendars are research areas, not shipped features — and we would rather tell you that than demo it to you.
Research Illinois law with the paper trail attached — statutes with the Public Act provenance behind them, plus court rules and regulations.
Methodology questions, count verification, or the underlying evidence for any claim in this story: press@lawengine.ai.
— Stephen Murphy, Founder, LawEngine
I build LawEngine because the people who have to follow the law deserve to see the receipts behind it — freely, and with the uncertainty shown instead of buried.