United States Code

The United States Code (U.S.C.) is a compilation and of the general and permanent federal.

Codification process
The official text of an is that of the "enrolled " (traditionally printed on parchment) presented to the President for his  or disapproval. Upon of a, the original bill is delivered to the , and duplicate copies are issued in pamphlet form as "slip laws" by the  (GPO). The Archivist assembles annual volumes of the enacted laws and publishes them as the . By law, the text of the  is "legal evidence" of the laws enacted by Congress.

The Statutes at Large, however, is not a convenient tool for legal research. It is arranged strictly in chronological order, so that statutes addressing related topics may be scattered across many volumes. Statutes often or amend earlier laws, and extensive  is required to determine what laws are in effect at any given time.

The Code is the result of an effort to make finding relevant and effective statutes simpler by reorganizing them by subject matter, and eliminating expired and amended sections. The Code is maintained by the (LRC) of the. The LRC determines which statutes should be codified, and which existing laws are affected by amendments or repeals, or have simply expired by their own terms. The LRC updates the Code accordingly.

Because of this codification approach, a single named statute (like the, or the ) may or may not appear in a single place in the Code. Often, complex legislation bundles a series of provisions together as a means of addressing a social or governmental problem; those provisions often fall in different logical areas of the Code. For example, a bill providing relief for family farms might affect items in Title 7 (Agriculture), Title 26, and Title 43. When the bill is codified, its various provisions might well be placed in different parts of those various Titles. Traces of this process are generally found in the Notes accompanying the "lead section" associated with the popular name, and in cross-reference tables that identify Code sections corresponding to particular Acts of Congress.

Usually the individual sections of a statute are incorporated into the Code exactly as enacted. Sometimes, however, editorial changes are made (for instance, the phrase "the date of enactment of this Act" is replaced by the actual date).

By law, the Code is " evidence" of the law in effect. The Statutes at Large remains the ultimate authority. If a dispute arises as to the accuracy or completeness of the codification, the courts will turn to the language in the United States Statutes at Large.

In addition, the LRC continues the process of revising, updating, and restating the existing body of in codified form, and as it completes particular areas of the law it proposes to enact those titles of the Code as "". If enacted into law, these titles of the Code repeal all previous enactments on the subject (including those found in the Statutes at Large) and adopt the Code itself as a statute, thereby making these titles "legal evidence" of the law in force.

Only "general and permanent" laws are codified; the Code does not usually include provisions that apply only to a limited number of people (a ) or for a limited time, such as most acts or  laws, which apply only for a single. If these limited provisions are significant, however, they may be printed as "notes" underneath related sections of the Code. The codification is based on the content of the laws, however, not the vehicle by which they are adopted; so, for instance, if an appropriations act contains substantive, permanent legislation (as is sometimes the case), the permanent provisions will be incorporated into the Code even though they were adopted as part of a non-permanent enactment.

Organization
The Code is divided into 50 titles (listed below), which deal with broad, logically organized areas of legislation. Titles may optionally be divided into subtitles, parts, subparts, s, and subchapters. All titles have sections (represented by a ), as their smallest basic coherent unit, though sections are often divided into subsections, paragraphs, and s. Not all titles use the same series of subdivisions above the section level, and they may arrange them in different order. For example, in Title 26 (the tax code), the order of subdivision runs Title - Subtitle - Chapter - Subchapter - Part - Subpart - Section - Subsection - Paragraph - Subparagraph - Clause - Subclause. In Title 38 ('s Benefits) the order runs Title - Part - Chapter - Subchapter - Section. Put another way, the Title is always the largest division of the Code, and the section the smallest (except for subsections, paragraphs, clauses, etc.), but intermediate levels vary in both number and sequence from Title to Title.

The word "title" in this context is roughly akin to a printed "volume," although many of the larger titles span multiple volumes. Similarly, no particular size or length is associated with other subdivisions; a section might run several pages in print, or just a sentence or two. Some subdivisions within particular titles acquire meaning of their own; for example, it's common for lawyers to refer to a "Chapter 11" or a "Subchapter K".

A sample citation would be , the. A would read that out loud as "Title five, United States Code, section five hundred fifty-two A."

When sections are repealed, their text is deleted and replaced by a note summarizing what used to be there. This is necessary so that lawyers reading old cases can understand what the cases are talking about. As a result, some portions of the Code consist entirely of empty chapters full of historical notes. For example, Title 8, Chapter 7 is labeled "Exclusion of Chinese." This contains historical notes relating to the, which is no longer in effect.

Early compilations
Early efforts at codifying the Acts of Congress were undertaken by private publishers; these were useful shortcuts for research purposes, but had no official status. Congress undertook an official codification called the  approved, , for the laws in effect as of ,. Congress re-enacted a corrected version in 1878. The Revised Statutes were enacted as positive law, but subsequent enactments were not incorporated into the official code, so that over time researchers once again had to delve through many volumes of the . According to the preface to the Code, "From 1897 to 1907 a commission was engaged in an effort to codify the great mass of accumulating legislation. The work of the commission involved an expenditure of over $300,000, but was never carried to completion."

Official code
During the, some members of Congress revived the codification project, resulting in the approval of the United States Code by Congress in 1926.

The official version of the Code is published by the LRC as a series of paper volumes. The first edition of the Code was contained in a single bound volume; today, it spans several large volumes. Normally, a new edition of the Code is issued every six years, with annual supplements identifying the changes made by legislation in each session of Congress. In practice, however, the Code is kept up-to-date on a near-current basis as laws are enacted, and notes are printed in the margins of the slip laws indicating where each section will be codified, if at all. Both the LRC and the GPO offer electronic versions of the Code to the public. The electronic version may be as much as 18 months behind current legislation, but it is the most up to date official version. A number of other online versions are freely available, including those at Findlaw and at Cornell's Legal Information Institute (see  below).

Annotated codes
Practicing lawyers who can afford them almost always use an annotated version of the U.S. Code from a private company. The two leading annotated versions are the United States Code Annotated, abbreviated as U.S.C.A., and the United States Code Service, abbreviated as U.S.C.S. The U.S.C.A. is published by, and U.S.C.S. is published by  (part of ), although the current edition was originated by the Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Co. See . These annotated versions contain notes following each section of the law, which summarize relevant court decisions, law review articles, and other authorities, and may also include uncodified provisions that are part of the Public Laws. The publishers of these versions frequently issue supplements that contain newly-enacted laws, which may not yet have appeared in an official published version of the Code. When an attorney is viewing an annotated code on an online service, such as, all the citations in the annotations are ed to the referenced opinions and documents.

Other relevant codifications
The Code generally contains only those Acts of Congress known as public laws (although the notes sometimes contain related Executive Orders and other presidential documents). The Code does not contain statutes known as private laws, nor does it contain regulations adopted by executive agencies through the process set out in the. These regulations are published chronologically in the and are then compiled by topic or subject matter in the  (C.F.R.), which constitutes an additional important source of federal law.

Parts of interest
The is contained in Title 10, Chapter 47. It defines infractions such as going and contains the popularly-known phrase, "."

Title 11 is the. Some of the different types of are commonly referred to simply by their chapter numbers:, ,.

Title 18 deals with federal.

Title 26 is also known as the. Much of Title 26 is administered and enforced by the and is one of the largest portions of the Code.

Title 42 is a lengthy title which includes statutes governing several large federal government programs like and. One provision,, is the basis for a wide range of federal actions in federal courts; it is the codification of the. Section 1983 cases include suits alleging use of excessive force by police and First Amendment suits against public schools to maintain church/state separation. Section 1983 itself is quite short; the annotations (i.e., the digests and summaries of court decisions interpreting it), however, span several volumes.

Titles
Titles that have been ed into positive law are indicated by blue shading below.

* Includes Appendix of s not yet enacted into positive law.