120-34. Printing of session laws; numbering of session laws.

(a) The Legislative Services Commission shall publish all laws and joint resolutions passed at each session of the General Assembly and the executive orders of the Governor issued since the adjournment of the prior session of the General Assembly. The laws and joint resolutions shall be kept separate and indexed separately. Each volume shall contain a certificate from the Secretary of State stating that the volume was printed under the direction of the Legislative Services Commission from ratified acts and resolutions and executive orders of the Governor on file in the Office of the Secretary of State. The Commission may publish the Session Laws and House and Senate Journals of extra and special sessions of the General Assembly in the same volume or volumes as those of regular sessions of the General Assembly. In printing the ratified acts and resolutions, the signatures of the presiding officers and the Governor shall be omitted.

The enrolling clerk or the Legislative Services Office shall assign to each bill that becomes law a number in the order the bill became law, and the laws shall be printed in the Session Laws in that order. The number shall be preceded by the phrase "Session Law" or the letters "S.L." followed by the calendar year it was ordered enrolled, followed by a hyphen and the sequential law number. Laws of Extra Sessions shall so indicate. In the case of any bill required to be presented to the Governor, and which became law, the Session Laws shall carry, below the date of ratification, editorial notes as to what time and what date the bill became law. In any case where the Governor has returned a bill to the General Assembly with objections, those objections shall be printed verbatim in the Session Laws, regardless of whether or not the bill became law notwithstanding the objections.

(b) All index references with respect to the session laws shall refer to the Chapter numbers of such laws in lieu of page numbers, and all index references to resolutions shall refer to the resolution numbers of the resolutions in lieu of page numbers, to the end that the indexes shall thereby be made consistent with the index to the General Statutes which refers to the section numbers and not to page numbers.

(c) There shall be printed not more than 2,500 volumes of the session laws and 600 volumes of the journals of each house of each session of the General Assembly, all of which shall be bound, and delivered to the Secretary of State for distribution by him under the provisions of G.S. 147-45, G.S. 147-46.1, G.S. 147-48 and other applicable statutes.