Art. 1392.Proof of Statutes

Chapter 2 of this Title was once titled Proof of Official Records, and it covered how a party proves things like statutes, ordinances, and other official documents in court. Nearly all of that chapter, Articles 1391 and 1393 through 1397, has since been repealed, its subject matter absorbed elsewhere, chiefly into Louisiana's Code of Evidence. Article 1392 alone survives, and it's worth reading on its own terms rather than as a relic of the chapter around it.

The article requires a court to take judicial notice of the laws of the United States and of every state, territory, and other American jurisdiction. Judicial notice means the court accepts something as established without requiring formal proof of it — no certified copies, no expert testimony on what another state's statute says, no treating the content of that law as a contested fact for the jury to weigh. The article points to Code of Evidence Article 202 for the actual mechanics of how that notice works.

For a party litigating a case that turns on the law of another state or a federal statute, Article 1392 removes a real evidentiary burden: the content of that law doesn't need to be proven up like a disputed fact, because the court is required to know it, or to inform itself of it, on its own.