Some general resources on the US Code

["Thomas R. Bruce" <tom@liicornell.org>]

Folks:

Here is some background on the peculiarities of the American Federal 
legislative process --  or rather, on what happens after it is passed.  
You may want to take a look at my e-mail to the group of a few months 
back, outlining in very broad brush the differences between the US and 
everybody else. To recap, everybody else passes an Act, and subsequent 
legislation is written to refer to that Act if in some way it modifies 
it; at some point, the accumulated changes are consolidated into a new 
version of the Act and the consolidated Act is re-passed by the 
legislature. No doubt that is a very naive summary, but that is how it 
looks from the distant perspective of a place that was never ruled by 
Napoleon ;).  We, on the other hand, have a "Code" that is a 
topically-arranged compilation of legislation passed by the legislature 
as bills, acts, statutes, or public laws (the terms are pretty much 
interchangeable).  The compilation may be considered the ultimate 
evidence of the law, or it may not, depending on which of 51 Titles we 
are talking about.  Titles which have been cleaned up by the Office of 
the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC or LRC) and re-passed in that form by 
Congress are referred to as "positive law Titles".

The general outlines of the codification process are pretty well 
described in the wikipedia article at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_states_code , as is its progress.  
There are significant numbers of non-positive-law Titles.

For the moment (maybe for quite a few moments) let's not concern 
ourselves with what goes on prior to passage.

There are some things to think about, already, in terms of OLRC's 
process.  It's important to note that there are two streams of activity. 
First, there is the routine compilation of new laws passed by Congress 
into the Code, a process known as "classification". Second, there is the 
ongoing editorial activity of cleaning up non-positive law Titles and 
preparing them for adoption by Congress as positive law.  Yes, there is 
some competition between those two processes, and yes, I imagine that 
sometimes this leaves the folks at OLRC trying to hit a moving target.  
I think most of Grant's remarks yesterday were probably directed at the 
latter process, but it's important to note that Congress does not stop 
passing laws while a non-positive-law Title is undergoing cleanup 
(somehow, the image of the "closed for cleaning" sign that you would 
find outside an airport restroom is intruding into my mind, and I must 
make it stop).

As to the classification process, OLRC publishes a number of handy 
things you can look at to get a general idea of what the activity is like:

a) The classification tables are summaries of all compilation decisions 
made within a given time frame, organized by Public Law (statute) number 
and US Code section.  See 
http://uscodebeta.house.gov/classification/tbl112pl_2nd.htm  (this will 
also get you to the OLRC site, a valuable resource for all things 
codification).  We use these to drive a number of features on our web 
site, notably the Updates tab for US Code sections. An example that 
takes in the recent changes that implicate 42 USC 301 (aka the Social 
Security Act) is at 
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/chapter-7?quicktabs_8=3#quicktabs-8 
.    The

b) The Table of Popular Names maps popular names of Acts (the "Social 
Security Act" ) to the Statutes at Large and to the USC. See, eg., 
http://www.law.cornell.edu/topn/S , where you'll find the Social 
Security Act and a bunch of amending acts some distance down the page.  
Note that it points to something called the short title, which for some 
reason we have not linked (need to see to that).

c) US Code subdivisions -- sections, or bigger, vaguely fictional 
aggregations called Parts, Chapters, Subchapters, etc --  usually 
contain an associated Notes section documenting amendments since the 
beginning of time; take a look at the Notes tab at 
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1305 .  This is not a 
particularly interesting one.  A more readable and indicative example is 
at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/chapter-7/subchapter-IX .   
Sometimes, the "short title" notes for a section contain a roadmap for 
classification of the entire Act of which that section is a part,  as well.

d) However, the best way to answer the question, "how did that Act get 
classified"? is to look at Table 3 or Table 1.  The two are used 
together.  Table 3 records the original classification decisions made; 
you can see an example entry for a Public Law at 
http://uscode.house.gov/table3/112_17.htm , which documents the fate of 
Public Law 112-17,the 17th law passed by the 112th Congress. Note that 
Statutes at Large references are given by page number, which houses its 
own platoon of devils.  Table 1 documents the mapping of non-positive 
law sections of the US Code to new section numbers in the positive-law 
version of any Title that has, in fact, been passed into positive law.  
Normally these are applied seriatim -- you look first to Table 3 to see 
what was done with your PL section initially, then to Table 1 to find 
out what happened when, if ever, the Title was passed into positive 
law.  This sort of thing has convinced your humble scribe that the 
United States Congress should be investing more than it is in 
triplestores, but that is a matter for another day.

Incidentally, it remains unclear to me whether Table 3 provides a 
complete "tracing record" of the fate of a particular provision.  It 
definitely records the initial classification decision. But then 
sometimes things get moved around inside the Code.  For example, Title 6 
(previously a repealed Title having to do with something else) was 
revived a few years back, and redesignated as the container for all 
things having to do with the Department of Homeland Security.  A whole 
lot of stuff was plucked from all over the Code and stuck in there, 
basically tracking the changes in the government org chart that occurred 
when DHS was formed.  I don't think that Table 3 addresses that -- it 
surely records the original classification decisions regarding all the 
stuff that was only later moved into Title 6, but it surely does not 
record the subsequent move into Title 6, and I doubt that it was revised 
to re-target the original classification decision to whereever the 
provision in question ultimately ended up.

With apologies to Fabio for using the word "mapping", the next rant I 
send out will have a few words to say about Table 3 and the essence of 
what is found there.  Because it is really, really confusing and needs 
treatment in its own right.  Also, I have something ready to hand that 
was done for a joint study that sort of illuminates the issues, and I am 
skilled at cut-and-paste.

A final point:  So far as I know, there are no real controls on what 
"coordinate" or "address" system is used in amending language in new 
legislation (in that context, it is important to remember that nothing 
constrains new legislation to pass through either the House or Senate 
Office of Legislative Counsel, aka HOLC and SOLC.  If Representative 
Fathead of West Overshoe, NY wants to write his bill in crayon on a 
cocktail napkin and drop it in the hopper for consideration by the House 
of Representatives of these great United States (God save them!), he may 
do so.  And does.).  It is likely that HOLC and SOLC have higher 
standards for what they do.  But I think that much of the time you'd 
find that amending language is expressed any old way; possibly in terms 
of titles, sections and paragraphs of the original Act, and sometimes in 
terms of sections and subsections of the as-codified version in the US 
Code.

Oh, and while we're at it:  Titles in the original Act have nothing to 
do with Titles in the US Code.  Also, the named aggregation levels 
within the Code that occur between the section level and the level of 
the full Title have a naming scheme that varies from Title to Title -- 
they all use the same terms (subtitle, chapter, subchapter, part), but a 
given Title may not use the full set, and the names may correspond to 
different levels in the topical hierarchy depending on which Title 
you're talking about.  In terms of formal citation, these 
"supersections"  (as we call them in my shop) are fictional; citation is 
always by title and section, eg. 42 USC 301.  This leads to some 
interesting practices -- you will find the Note accompanying Chapter 7 
of Title 42, which is the Social Security Act, referred to in the 
classification tables and other OLRC-speak as the "Note preceding 42 USC 
301".  42 USC 301 is the first section in Chapter 7.

Isn't this fun?

More later,
T.




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Thomas R. Bruce @trbruce
Director, Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School
http://www.law.cornell.edu/ @liicornell
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