Statutes at Large - OpenCongress Wiki
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Statutes at Large
From OpenCongress Wiki
The Statutes at Large are the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress. Every public and private law passed by Congress is published in the Statutes at Large in order of the date it was enacted into law. The laws are arranged by Public Law number and are cited by volume and page number. Also included in the United States Statutes at Large are concurrent resolutions, proclamations by the President, proposed and ratified amendments to the Constitution, and reorganization plans. Until 1948, treaties and international agreements approved by the Senate were also published in the Statutes at Large. (More from GPO here).
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Online Free Sources for Statutes at Large
- 1789-1873, scanned as picture files as part of the American Memory Project, Library of Congress (link). Broken into 18 volumes over 84 years, scanned as TIFF files.
- 1951-2002, digitized per Joint Committee on the Library directive, Library of Congress (link). Broken into 1 volume per year, scanned as searchable PDF files.
- 2003-2008, digitized by Library of Congress and GPO ([1]). Broken down to the individual public law (multiple docs per year), scanned as searchable PDF.
- 1987-present, made available on THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/LegislativeData.php?&n=PublicLaws link). Broken down to the individual public law, published as TXT and PDF.
- 1789-2010, originally scanned by Constitution.org and republished (with permission) for reuse by anyone by Sunlight (http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/policy/statutes/index.html link). Searchable PDFs (of varying quality) published as single or multi-year volumes as PDF files. A conversion chart of volume number to year is available from Constitution.org here.
Terminology
When a bill is enacted into law, it is immediately assigned a slip law number in the format x P.L. y, where x is the session of congress, and y is the number of bills have have been enacted into law in that Congress. For example, a bill may become 101 P.L. 24, which is the 24th bill enacted into law in the 101th Congress. Laws come in two flavors: public and private, and are indicated as P.L. and Priv. L.
At the end of each Congress, all of the slip laws are compiled in chronological order into a book known as the Statutes at Large. It can take up to several years for publication. Citations in the Statutes at Large look something like this: x STAT. y, where x is the volume number and y is the page number. For example, 110 STAT. 873 refers to the 873rd page of volume 110.
Over time, the Office of Law Revision Counsel will codify the law: reorganizing the content of the slip laws thematically into the 50 volume [2]. However, unless Congress enacted the codified version of the statutes into law, they are not the official version of the law -- it is the collection of slip laws in the statutes at large that are the positive (i.e. official) version of the law. Much of the U.S. Code is not positive law.
More information, including what each of these documents contains, is available here from Arizona State University Libraries.
Crosswalks
A crosswalk between the slip law (PL), the session number (STAT), and the US Code is available from the Office of Law Revision Counsel here.
A crosswalk between the bill number and the slip law (PL) is usually included in the slip law, going back to 1904. THOMAS also contains a crosswalk between the two going back to the 1970s.
Blog Posts
- "What happens after a bill becomes a law" (5/14/2009)
- "A Year Later, Little Progress on Digitizing Legislative Documents" (11/16/2011)
