search_statutes

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Search North Carolina (NC) statutes by topic, keyword or phrase. Use this when you know the SUBJECT but not the citation — "what's the NC law about leaving a dog in a hot car", "failure to appear penalty", "when can I expunge a misdemeanor". If you already have a citation, use get_statute instead. Returns ranked sections with highlighted fragments showing why each matched, not full text: pick the one you want and call get_statute for it. Supports quoted "exact phrases", -excluded terms and `or`. `match_mode` says how the query was read: "all_terms" (every word), "any_of" (the query used `or`), "any_terms" (nothing matched every word, so any word was accepted) or "citation" (the query was a bare citation, so it was looked up directly; when the section doesn't exist, the nearest real sections by number come back as `suggestions`). The loose modes only return sections that contain at least one of your words. Results are ordered by `terms_matched` — how many of the search words a section contains, a quoted phrase counting only when it appears as a phrase — then by rank. Court shorthand is expanded automatically and case-insensitively — FTA, DWLR, PJC, AWDW and similar become the statutory wording, because the statute book spells the phrase out and never uses the abbreviation. The expansion is reported back as `expanded_query`. Searches the law in force today, at section level. A low top rank means the corpus probably has no section on point — NC simply has no statute on some subjects, and saying so is a better answer than the nearest loose word match.