Category Archives: united states code

Un-Legislative History

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Wikipedia is often a boon for quick legal research about well-publicized matters.  It’s a great way to find where a statute is codified, or the background of a famous case.  When it comes to legislative history, though, sometimes Wikipedia’s a bust.  For anyone looking for a good example of why one must follow up with proper research into legislative history, please see Wikipedia’s entry on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which passed in July 2010.  As of Nov. 16, 2010, Wikipedia has the following to say about the changes implemented by Title XI of Dodd-Frank:

“The Federal Reserve Act is amended to change the New York Federal Reserve President to a Presidential appointment, with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

In support of this assertion, Wikipedia cites and links to the Enrolled Final Version of HR 4173, available on the LOC’s Thomas page.  Unfortunately, Wikipedia gets it wrong:  The version of the bill that passed Congress removed that language (which had been proposed by the Senate but rejected by the House).  The Senate’s proposal in this regard was snipped on June 17, 2010, weeks before the final bill passed.  Legislative history research–including review of committee meeting transcripts–coupled with news and secondary source coverage bore out the truth.

We always offer cautions when it comes to Wikipedia, and now there’s a handy example to which we can refer.

UPDATE:  Thanks to our helpful reader, Wikipedia has been policed. . .while its lesson remains!

LOST LAWS: WHAT WE CAN’T FIND IN THE U.S. CODE

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LOST LAWS: WHAT WE CAN’T FIND IN THE U.S. CODE

by Will Tress

Golden Gate University Law Review, Vol. 40, Issue #2, Winter 2010, p. 129

Conclusion (p. 164)

Three features that detract from the U.S. Code as the comprehensive and authoritative source for federal statutes are rooted in the Code’s historical development.  The prima facie titles of the Code lack sufficient notice that the authoritative language of the statutes codified there resides in the Statutes at Large.  Better signposting for those titles is suggested.  Amendments to the positive law titles that are not drafted in the proper “direct amendment” format are relegated to footnotes, where they can be overlooked by the uninformed reader.  Annual corrective bills would ameliorate this problem.  General laws that are considered temporary, such as those included in appropriations acts, are left out of the Code entirely.  Pointers to these uncodified laws might be incorporated into an unofficial electronic version of the U.S. Code as part of the search results by sidebar references.  Such an electronic Code could easily provide the signposts to the session laws for prima facie titles and even insert draft versions of amendments into positive law titles pending official correction legislation.  The Congressional Offices of Code Revision and Legislative Counsel should collaborate with the Government Printing Office to use new information technology to fix old problems with the U.S. Code.

This article is going to be required reading for our class next year.  Its discussion of “the prima facie code” and the positive law titles, a topic that always throws the class for a bit of a loop, is the best I’ve seen on the subject, with excellent examples (and potential homework questions) in the footnotes.

Properties of the United States Code Citation Network

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“Properties of the United States Code Citation Network”

MICHAEL JAMES BOMMARITO, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Department of Political Science, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Center for Study of Complex Systems

DANIEL MARTIN KATZ, University of Michigan Law School , University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Center for Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan – Department of Political Science

The United States Code is a body of documents that collectively comprises the statutory law of the United States. In this short paper, we investigate the properties of the network of citations contained within the Code – most notably its degree distribution. Acknowledging the text contained within each of the Code’s section nodes, we adjust our interpretation of the nodes to control for section length. Though we find a number of interesting properties in these degree distributions, we demonstrate that a power law distribution is not an appropriate model for this system.

 

Source:  LSN Experimental & Empirical Studies Vol. 10 No. 103,  12/02/2009