Laws and Links Related to
General Federal Agency Operations

 Explanatory Notes

This site is jointly sponsored by the Society's Federal Special Interest Section and Legislative Research Special Interest Section. Suggestions of other laws to add are welcome.

For Department of Commerce (DoC) legislative histories the pin number or word to the catalog is what you make it, however, your Adobe Reader software must be at least version 6.0 or higher in order to view the PDF documents contained therein. The Pop-up blocker function on your browser must also be turned off.

Library of Congress (LoC) bill histories, or list of actions, and bill summaries are prepared by its Congressional Research Service and made available from 1973 (93rd Congress) to the present through THOMAS, the Library's legislative database. Senate bill numbers begin with an "S." and House of Representatives bill numbers begin with an "H.R." From 1989 (101st Congress) to the present the text of bills and resolutions are available on THOMAS and linked to each of its bill status/summary reports. From 1995 (104th Congress) forward committee reports are linked to the those reports and from 1999 (106th Congress) forward Congressional Record pages are also linked to the list of actions on each bill report. Currently, congressional hearings and Presidential signing statements are about the only legislative history documents not linked to THOMAS bill reports.

Public law numbers that uniquely identify a U.S. law have been assigned to U.S. statutes since 1908. The first number identifies the two year Congress and the second number is chronologically assigned to laws as they are enacted. However, it was not until 1957 that public law numbers were officially used for citation purposes. Before that time chapter numbers, for each congressional session, had been assigned to both public and private laws with a "statute" containing all the chapters in a particular congressional session. Thus many laws might have the same chapter number, even within the same congress. From 1995 to the present the text of public laws are available in PDF on GPO Access.

The date of a public law is the day that the President signs it into law or the date when both congressional chambers overide his veto. It is also the laws's effective date unless provisions within the law indicate otherwise.

The U.S. Statutes At Large contains all the public and private laws of the United States enacted by Congress since 1789. The first number of a statute citation identifies the volume number of the U.S. Statutes at Large (currently a volume number is assigned to each congressional session) followed by the beginning page number for a particular law (or title or section within a law). See United States Statutes At Large: Documents and Information Included

The United States Code (USC) is an updated subject arrangement of all general and permanent laws of United States still in force. It does not include annual appropriations, name changes on public buildings, repealed laws, and other local or non-permament matters. The USC was originally enacted in 1926 as "prima facie" evidence of the law, not positive law. On the face of it, the U.S. Code is the law of that land, but it is rebuttable by the presentation of prior statutes at variance with it. However, over time about half the 50 titles of the U.S. Code have been enacted into positive law while repealing related prior laws. The first number in a USC citation is the title and the second number is generally the section number. Provisions of public laws assigned as notes to sections in the USC also have the force of law as do statutory provisions omitted as unnecessary from the Code, but not repealed. See United States Code: Historical Outline and Explanatory Notes.

The Office of the Law Revision Counsel in the U.S. House Representatives is empowered to assign Code cites to new statutory provisions, to prepare the official U.S. Code for publication, and to prepare non-positive law titles of the U.S. Code for enactment (2 USC § 285 et. seq.). The links to the USC on this page are to those presented by the Legal Information Institute of the Cornell Law School, which obtains its data in various releases from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. However, regardless of the release date, all information is updated in January of each year and it is generally two to three years behind the current date. To check if a provision has changed see the U.S. Code Classification Tables published on the Web by the Office. Generally, only the primary U.S. Code cite of a particular law is listed for each of the above laws.

Links to the current Code of Federal Regualtions (CFR) is to the unofficial Beta site (e-CFR) on GPO Access, not to its annual CFR site. Agency regulations, promulgated pursuant to law, are first published in the Federal Register in proposed or final form where they are accompanied by explanations in the preamble. The matter in the CFR is just the finalized text of the regulations. The first number of a CFR cite is to the title and the second is to the CFR part. As with USC cites usually only one primary CFR cite is listed with the above public laws. See: A Research Guide to the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations.

Compiled and maintained by Richard J. McKinney (rick.mckinney@frb.gov), Assistant Law Librarian, Federal Reserve Board Law Library

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