Did Louisiana repeal its digital assets law?

No. And this page is a retraction of our own reporting. On 8 August 2026 we published, at this URL, the claim that Louisiana had repealed a Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act chapter effective 1 July 2024. That claim was wrong. We found the error ourselves later the same day and replaced the page rather than quietly deleting it.

This is general information about what a statute says. It is not legal advice, and Louisiana is a civil-law jurisdiction whose succession law does not map neatly onto the other forty-nine states. Talk to a Louisiana attorney about an actual estate.

What we got wrong

We claimed that 2016 House Bill 1118 enacted RUFADAA into Louisiana as R.S. 51:2701–2720, and that R.S. 51:2701 now reading “Repealed by Acts 2024, No. 312, §2, eff. July 1, 2024” therefore meant Louisiana had repealed its digital-assets law and that most fifty-state tables were out of date.

The second half of that — the current text of R.S. 51:2701 — is accurate and you can check it at the link above. The first half is not. R.S. 51:2701 was never a digital-assets provision.

The evidence that settles it

The Internet Archive holds snapshots of the Louisiana Legislature’s own page for that exact section. We fetched three, on 8 August 2026. All three read identically:

CHAPTER 44. LOUISIANA OUT-OF-STATE PHARMACY REGISTRATION ACT
§2701. Repealed by Acts 1999, No. 767, §3.

2016 is before all three. If HB 1118 had put RUFADAA at R.S. 51:2701, these snapshots would say so. They say pharmacy registration, and they say the section had already been repealed in 1999.

The neighbouring sections agree. Fetched by us on 8 August 2026, each at its own permanent URL: R.S. 51:2702, 2703, 2704 and 2705 each read in their entirety “Repealed by Acts 1999, No. 767, §3.” There is no R.S. 51:2706–2720 in the code at all; the numbering jumps from 2705 to 2751, and then to 2761, the New Assistive Devices Warranty Act.

Control check. A “we found nothing” result is worthless from a tool you have not proved works, so we ran one that had to succeed: R.S. 9:2449 returns full substantive text about individual retirement accounts. The method works; the absences above are real absences.

What Acts 2024, No. 312 actually did — the clincher

We could not read the repealing act when we published the wrong version. We can now. Act No. 312 of the 2024 Regular Session is Senate Bill 206 by Senator McMath, and its enrolled text is one page: legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1380784 (PDF, fetched 8 August 2026). It is headed ENROLLED, and it reads:

“To repeal Sections 1 and 3(A) of Act No. 459 of the 2023 Regular Session and Chapter 44 of Title 51 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes of 1950, comprised of R.S. 51:2701, relative to the Port Development Advisory Commission; to provide relative to the office of port development; to repeal the Port Development Advisory Commission; to repeal the office of port development…”

That resolves it completely. The thing repealed effective 1 July 2024 was a ports commission. Louisiana had reused the R.S. 51:2701 slot: an out-of-state pharmacy chapter until it was repealed in 1999, then, by Act 459 of 2023, the Port Development Advisory Commission — repealed a year later by Act 312 of 2024. Note also that the act describes Chapter 44 as “comprised of R.S. 51:2701”, a single section, not the twenty-section range 2701–2720 we asserted.

What happened to House Bill 1118

The document we relied on is real, and it says what we said it says. Fetched again on 8 August 2026: legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=999125 is a 21-page PDF of 2016 House Bill 1118 by Representative Marcus Hunter, an act

“To enact Chapter 44 of Title 51 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes of 1950, to be comprised of R.S. 51:2701 through 2720, relative to fiduciaries and the digital property of decedents and other certain persons…”

But that PDF is headed ENGROSSED, not ENROLLED. An engrossed bill is a bill as it stood partway through the process. Only an enrolled bill has passed both chambers. We described it as the enrolled text, which was our first mistake and the one that should have stopped us.

The bill’s own page on the Legislature’s site — BillInfo for 2016 HB1118, fetched 8 August 2026 — gives:

• Current Status: “House adopted Conference Committee Report”. Not “signed by the Governor”, not “became Act No.…”.
• Text versions offered: Original, Engrossed, Reengrossed. No enrolled version.
• No act number anywhere on the page.
• The last recorded action is 06/06, the final day of the 2016 Regular Session: the House adopted the conference committee report, and the Senate was notified.

The straightforward reading is that HB 1118 ran out of session and died. We are stating that as the best available reading rather than as a verified fact, because a negative — “this never became law” — is exactly the kind of claim that got us here.

So what is Louisiana’s position on fiduciary access to digital assets?

We do not know, and we are not going to guess twice. What we can say, with what we have checked:

• Louisiana does not have a RUFADAA enactment at R.S. 51:2701 et seq. It never did.
• Anything that cites La. R.S. 51:2701 et seq. as Louisiana’s digital-assets statute — including our own page of 8 August 2026 — is citing a repealed pharmacy statute.
• We have not established that Louisiana has no such provision elsewhere in its code. Our earlier page reported an unconfirmed reading placing something at La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 3191; we could not reproduce that fetch, we could not reproduce it again today, and we are now treating it as unverified rather than as a lead.
• We have not established what Acts 2024, No. 312 does.

Until we can source it properly, Louisiana is marked unknown in our work rather than filled in. That is the whole standard this site is built on and it applies hardest to our own mistakes.

How this got published, and what we changed

The chain looked airtight and was not. A 2016 bill said it would enact R.S. 51:2701–2720 for digital assets; R.S. 51:2701 today says it was repealed in 2024; therefore Louisiana repealed its digital-assets law. Every individual link in that chain was a real document. The step that was never checked is whether the bill passed — and separately, whether R.S. 51:2701 had ever actually contained the chapter.

Two things would have caught it, and both are cheap:

1. Read the header of the document you are citing. The PDF says ENGROSSED at the top of page one.
2. Look at the archived history of a statute before asserting what it used to be. Three Wayback snapshots, thirty seconds, and the whole claim collapses.

One useful by-product: the earlier page said no permanent link to a Louisiana statute section was possible, because the Legislature’s lookup is a form post. That was also wrong. The form issues an HTTP redirect to a stable per-section URL of the form legis.la.gov/Legis/Law.aspx?d=<id>, and every citation on this page uses one.