Law Search

The searches below provide access to all wilderness laws, including the Wilderness Act. You can also view all wilderness areas affected by all public laws.

Search by Wilderness

This search allows you to find all public laws affecting a single wilderness area. Start typing the name of the wilderness, or the state the wilderness is located, to display selectable results and narrow the number of matching wilderness areas.

Search by Law

Selection Box for public law

Search by Year

This search allows you to find all public laws affecting wilderness using a year or range of years.


Text Search

This search utilizes Google to search all wilderness-related public laws for a particular phrase, word, or portion of a word. 


Note: We are transitioning the site structure so the location of the public law PDF files that some of the Google displayed results will be temporalily inaccurate.  Until Google recrawls the new folder the links provided will display an error unless you remove '/PDF' from the urls, that have it, in the Google search results.  We apologize for any inconvience this may cause and will remove this note after Google updates the public law search results.

Understanding the Law Library

It is important to remember that not all public laws in the library designate or directly affect a wilderness or wildernesses. Some laws, including the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act (just to name a few) do not designate wilderness, yet they are laws that influence wilderness management.

Footnotes

*Acreage legislated by year may not necessarily match the acreage values reported for each wilderness. Legislated values are estimates of land area found in public laws. To learn more about acreages or for a table showing acreage legislated by year.