The United States Code is the codification of the general and permanent laws of the United States by object. It is divided into 53 titles according to general topics and is published by the Office of the Law Review Advisor of the United States House of Representatives. The official text of a congressional bill is that of the “inscribed law” (traditionally printed on parchment) submitted to the president for signature or rejection. After a law comes into force, the original invoice is submitted to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). [7] After approval by the OFR,[8] copies are distributed as “slip laws” by the Government Publishing Office (GPO). The archivist compiles annual volumes of promulgated laws and publishes them as the United States Statutes at Large. By law, the text of the General Statutes is “legal proof” of laws enacted by Congress. [9] Slip laws are also competent evidence. [10] The Code generally contains only acts of Congress or by-laws called public laws. The Code itself does not contain decrees or other executive documents related to laws or rules issued by the courts. However, these related documents are sometimes included in the notes of the relevant legal sections or in the annexes. The Code does not contain laws that are called private law when they are passed, nor laws that are considered temporary, as means.
These laws are contained in the General Statutes for the year of entry into force. However, the Statutes in general are not an appropriate instrument for legal research. It is strictly organized in chronological order; Statutes dealing with related topics can be scattered in many volumes. Laws often repeal or amend previous statutes, and extensive cross-references are needed to determine which laws are in effect at any given time. [2] Early efforts to codify the laws of Congress were undertaken by private publishers; These were useful abbreviations for research purposes, but they had no official status. Congress made an official codification called the Revised Statutes of the United States, which was approved on June 22, 1874 for the laws in effect on December 1, 1873. Congress reinstated a corrected version in 1878. The 1874 version of the revised Statutes was promulgated as a positive law, but the 1878 version was not, and subsequent congressional decrees were not included in the official codex, so scholars had to dig back into many volumes of the Statutes in general over time. In United States law, the Code of Laws of the United States of America[1] (abbreviated Code of the United States, United States Code, U.S.C., or USC) is the official compilation and codification of general and permanent federal laws. [2] It contains 53 titles (Titles 1 to 54, with the exception of Title 53, which is reserved for a proposed title on small businesses). [3] [4] The main edition is published every six years by the Office of the House of Representatives` Law Review Council, and cumulative supplements are published annually. [2] [5] [6] The official version of these laws is contained in the United States Statutes at Large, an uncodified chronological compilation.
The United States Code is divided into two types of law: non-positive law and positive law. Non-positive laws are titles[1] of the United States Code, the title of which is an editorial compilation of related laws. These U.S. Code titles are not in themselves a law. The United States Code itself states that non-positive titles are only prima facie evidence of the law and that the Statutes in general are legal proof of the law. In particular, the United States Code often amends a law to improve readability. For example, section 2 of the Federal Communications Act of 1934 begins with the following words: “The provisions of this Act shall apply to all interstate and foreign communications by cable or radio.” However, when converting the language to 47 U.S.C. §152, the United States Code: “The provisions of this chapter apply to all intergovernmental and foreign communications by wire or radio.” The United States Code refers to the chapter (i.e., Chapter 5) because it codifies the Federal Communications Act of 1934. Only by examining the law can a reader determine whether the United States Code has significant differences. The Supreme Court has even ruled that a non-positive provision of the United States Code is an inaccurate description of the law. Practicing lawyers who can afford it almost always use an annotated version of a private company`s code. The two main annotated versions are the United States Code Annotated, abbreviated as USCA, and the United States Code Service, abbreviated as USCS.
[22] The USCA is published by West (part of Thomson Reuters) and USCS is published by LexisNexis (part of Reed Elsevier), which acquired the lawyers co-operative publishing co-operative publishing co. in 1997, following an antitrust dispute, when Lawyers` parent company acquired Co-operative Publishing West. [23] These annotated versions contain annotations to each section of the Act, which may organize and summarize court decisions, legal summary sections and other powers related to the section of the Code, and may also include uncodified provisions that are part of public statutes. [22] Publishers of these versions often publish supplements (in paper form in the form of pocket coins) containing newly enacted laws that may not yet have appeared in an officially published version of the Code, as well as updated secondary documents such as new court decisions on the subject. [22] When a lawyer consults an annotated code on an online service such as Westlaw or LexisNexis, all citations in the annotations are linked to court opinions and other referenced documents. Regulations issued by executive agencies as part of the process of developing the rules set out in the Administrative Procedures Act are published chronologically in the Federal Register and then codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Similarly, state laws and regulations are often codified in state-specific codes. Conversely, positive laws are titles[2] of the United States Code, which are actual laws. Congress repealed all related individual laws and enacted the title itself as law. For these titles, the United States Code is the law and the United States Code considers positive legal titles as legal proof of the law. When amending an existing portion of the Positive Act, Congress will directly amend the United States Code.
When new positive legislation is added, Congress will create one or more new sections of the United States Code. The preface to the code states: “From 1897 to 1907, a commission undertook to codify the vast mass of laws accumulated. The Commission`s work involved spending more than $300,000, but was never completed. Only the Criminal Code of 1909 and the Judicial Code of 1911 were enacted. In the absence of a complete official code, private publishers have bundled the new laws into unofficial codes. The first edition of the United States Code (published as Statutes at Large Volume 44, Part 1) contains cross-reference tables between USC and two of these unofficial codes, United States Compiled Statutes Annotated by West Publishing Co. and Federal Statutes Annotated by Edward Thompson Co. The CCRA announced an “editorial reclassification” of federal elections and elections laws, which came into force on September 1, 2014. This reclassification involved the displacement of various laws previously classified in Titles 2 and 42 to a new Title 52, which was not transposed into positive law.
[6] Only “general and permanent” laws are codified in the United States Code; As a general rule, the Code does not contain provisions that apply only to a limited number of persons (private law) or for a limited period of time, like most licensing or budget laws that apply to only one fiscal year. However, if these limited provisions are relevant, they may be reprinted as “notes” in the relevant sections of the Code. However, codification is based on the content of the laws, not on the vehicle by which they are promulgated; For example, if an act of credit contains substantial and permanent provisions (which sometimes are the case), those provisions are included in the Code, even if they were made under a temporary order. [16] Simple search – Use keywords, search operators, and metadata fields in a single search box. Perform a search using only US code by adding collection:uscode to your simple search query. Example: www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2006-title2 As a general rule, individual sections of a statute are included in the code exactly as they were published; However, sometimes editorial changes are made by the CRA (for example, the phrase “the date of coming into force of this Act” is replaced by the actual date). Although permitted by law, these changes do not constitute a positive right. [11]. The possible values: suspended, omitted, transferred, revoked, disposed of, unused, reserved, default securities converted into positive law[29], are indicated by shades of blue below with the year of the last entry into force. Search by title number These examples search for U.S.C.
Code 27 documents. SuDoc class numbers in govinfo are usually at the class teacher level, not at the book number level. The Office of the Law Review Advisors (LRC) has prepared a draft text for three other titles of the federal law. The purpose of these proposed titles exists today in one or more existing titles. Text of the title of the object in the schedule to the title of the United States Code that contains the sheet node. Of the 54 titles, the following titles have been transposed into positive (legal) law: 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 23, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51 and 54.