The United States Code, formally The Code of Laws of the United States of America,The Code of Laws of the United States of America, Title 1, General Provisions, p. 1 (2024). is the official codification of the general and permanent federal statutes of the United States. It contains 53 titles organized into numbered sections.Title 34 (Navy) was repealed, but the numbering system was retained until the creation of a new Title 34 in 2017. See USC Table of Contents .
The U.S. Code is published by the United States House of Representatives' Office of the Law Revision Counsel. New editions are published every six years, with cumulative supplements issued each year.About United States Code . Gpo.gov. Retrieved on 2013-07-19. The official version of these laws appears in the United States Statutes at Large, a chronological, uncodified compilation.
Codification
Process The official text of an act of Congress is that of the "enrolled bill" (traditionally printed on parchment) presented to the president for his signature or disapproval. Upon enactment of a law, the original bill is delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). After authorization from the OFR, copies are distributed as "slip laws" (as unbound, individually paginated pamphlets) by the Government Publishing Office (GPO). The OFR assembles annual volumes of the enacted laws and publishes them as the United States Statutes at Large. By law, the text of the Statutes at Large is "legal evidence" of the laws enacted by Congress. Slip laws are also competent evidence.
The Statutes at Large, however, is not a convenient tool for legal research. It is arranged strictly in chronological order; statutes addressing related topics may be scattered across many volumes, and are not consolidated with later amendments. Statutes often repeal or amend earlier laws, and extensive cross-referencing is required to determine what laws are in force at any given time.
The United States 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 Office of the Law Revision Counsel (LRC) of the U.S. House of Representatives. The LRC determines which statutes in the United States Statutes at Large should be codified, and which existing statutes 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 Taft–Hartley Act or the Embargo Act) 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, an act providing relief for family farms might affect items in Title 7 (Agriculture), Title 26 (Tax), and Title 43 (Public Lands). When the act 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; however, sometimes editorial changes are made by the LRC (for instance, the phrase "the date of enactment of this Act" is replaced by the actual date). Though authorized by statute, these changes do not constitute positive law.
Legal status The authority for the material in the United States Code comes from its enactment through the legislative process and not from its presentation in the code. For example, the United States Code omitted for decades, apparently because it was thought to have been repealed. In its 1993 ruling in U.S. National Bank of Oregon v. Independent Insurance Agents of America, the Supreme Court ruled that 12 U.S.C. § 92 was still valid law.
A positive law title is a title that is itself a federal statute, that is to say that it is one that has been enacted and codified into law by the United States Congress. The title itself has been enacted. By contrast, a non-positive law title is a title that has not been codified into federal law, and is instead merely an editorial compilation of individually enacted federal statutes.
By law, those titles of the United States Code that have not been enacted into positive law are "prima facie evidence"See . of the law in effect. The United States Statutes at Large remains the ultimate authority. If a dispute arises as to the accuracy or completeness of the codification of an unenacted title, the courts will turn to the language in the United States Statutes at Large. In case of a conflict between the text of the Statutes at Large and the text of a provision of the United States Code that has not been enacted as positive law, the text of the Statutes at Large takes precedence.
In contrast, if Congress enacts a particular title (or other component) of the code into positive law, the enactment repeals all of the previous acts of Congress from which that title of the code derives; in their place, Congress gives the title of the code itself the force of law. This process makes that title of the United States Code "legal evidence""[ … ] whenever titles of such Code shall have been enacted into positive law the text thereof shall be legal evidence of the laws therein contained, in all the courts of the United States [ … ]" . of the law in force. Where a title has been enacted into positive law, a court may neither permit nor require proof of the underlying original acts of Congress.See, e.g., United States v. Zuger, 602 F. Supp. 889, 891 (D. Conn. 1984) ("Where a title has, however, been enacted into positive law, the Code title itself is deemed to constitute conclusive evidence of the law; recourse to other sources is unnecessary and precluded.")
The distinction between enacted and unenacted titles is largely academic because the code is nearly always accurate. The United States Code is routinely cited by the Supreme Court and other federal courts without mentioning this theoretical caveat. On a day-to-day basis, very few lawyers cross-reference the code to the Statutes at Large. Attempting to capitalize on the possibility that the text of the United States Code can differ from the United States Statutes at Large, Bancroft-Whitney for many years published a series of volumes known as United States Code Service (USCS), which used the actual text of the United States Statutes at Large; the series is now published by the Michie Company after Bancroft-Whitney parent Thomson Corporation divested the title as a condition of acquiring West.
Uncodified statutes Only "general and permanent" laws are codified in the United States Code; the code does not usually include provisions that apply only to a limited number of people (a private law) or for a limited time, such as most appropriation acts or budget laws, which apply only for a single fiscal year. 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 provisions (as is sometimes the case), these provisions will be incorporated into the code even though they were adopted as part of a non-permanent enactment.For example, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2006, , (2005)—a time-specific appropriations act that the President signed into law on December 30, 2005—contains in its Division A, Title X the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 ("DTA"). The DTA set out, among other things, permanent provisions governing standards for interrogation of persons in Defense Department custody, prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment, and procedures for status review of extraterritorial detainees. See id. at div. A, tit. X, §§ 1001–1006, –44. Notably, DTA section 1002 was printed as a note to ; DTA section 1003 was codified as (though the section has not yet been enacted into positive law); and DTA section 1005(e)(1) codified a new subsection (e) of (which became positive law upon the DTA's enactment).
Congress also enacted a nearly identical version of the DTA as a component of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006, see , div. A, tit. XIV, §§ 1401–1406, , 3474–80 (2006)—an authorization act that the President signed into law on January 6, 2006 (a week after he signed the original DTA into law). The December 2005 and January 2006 versions of the DTA are generally identical except for certain provisions in the section relating to training of Iraqi security forces (section 1006 of the Dec. '05 DTA and section 1406 of the Jan. '06 DTA). As a result, both the Dec. '05 and Jan. '06 DTAs appear to have made essentially simultaneous and duplicative amendments to the Code and its notes. But see the legislative history notes under (to the effect that two subsection (e)s of that statutory section have apparently been enacted).
As of , there has been no litigation challenging the validity of either of the DTA statutes on these grounds.
Versions and history
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 Revised Statutes of the United States approved June 22, 1874, for the laws in effect as of December 1, 1873. Congress re-enacted a corrected version in 1878. The 1874 version of the Revised Statutes were enacted as positive law, but the 1878 version was not and subsequent enactments of Congress were not incorporated into the official code, so that over time researchers once again had to delve through many volumes of the Statutes at Large.
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." Only the Criminal Code of 1909 and the Judicial Code of 1911 were enacted. In the absence of a comprehensive official code, private publishers once again collected the more recent statutes into unofficial codes. The first edition of the United States Code (published as Statutes at Large Volume 44, Part 1) includes cross-reference tables between the USC and two of these unofficial codes, United States Compiled Statutes Annotated by West Publishing Co. and Federal Statutes Annotated by Edward Thompson Co.
Official code During the 1920s, some members of Congress revived the codification project, resulting in the approval of the United States Code by Congress in 1926.; . 44 Stat. 777 does not actually include the text of Public Law 69-440. Under the entry for that law, it instead presents a brief editor's note explaining that Public Law 69-440 was separately published as part 1 of volume 44 of the Statutes at Large (to imply that the reader needs to look on the shelf for that other book).
The official version of the code is published by the LRC (Office of the Law Revision Counsel) 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 cumulative supplements identifying the changes made by Congress since the last "main edition" was published.
The official code was last printed in 2024.
Digital and Internet versions