When a bill is enacted into law, it may amend or repeal earlier laws, or it may create an entirely new or "freestanding" law. Recently enacted laws are first printed individually as separate statutes known as "slip laws." This report provides an overview of federal statutes in each of these forms, as well as basic guidance for congressional staff researching statutes. The United States Statutes at Large

Every two years at the end of a congressional session, slip laws (both public and private laws) are accumulated and published chronologically in a series of volumes entitled the United States Statutes at Large ( Statutes at Large ) . The U.S. Code has its roots in an 1866 law that initiated a project to "revise, simplify, arrange, and consolidate all statutes of the United States, general and permanent in their nature...." This endeavor was not fully realized until 1874, when the Revised Statutes of 1874 became the first official codification of U.S. laws. In the U.S. C ode , statutes are grouped by subject matter into 54 titles and five appendices. The most notable difference between the U.S. Code and the Statutes at Large , however, is that language in the U.S. Code exists as amended to reflect subsequent changes made by later laws. Section 101 of IRCA amended the INA by adding new §274A to the statute. Positive Versus Non-Positive Law Titles of the U.S. Code

In 1947, Congress began enacting whole titles of the U.S. Code into law, generally repealing the underlying statutes. 644" as the enacting law in the source credits because the underlying statutes that individually created the whole of Title 3 have been repealed. Searching the U.S. Code

As previously noted, statutes are incorporated into U.S. Code to facilitate retrieval and access, because searching by subject may be easier than searching by date in some cases. The tables will also indicate which sections of the U.S. Code were repealed, omitted, or transferred.
This report provides an overview of federal statutes in their various forms, as well as basic guidance for congressional staff interested in researching statutes. When a bill becomes a law, the newly enacted statute may amend or repeal earlier statutes or it may create a new or "freestanding" law. Either way, these new statutes are first printed individually as "slip laws" and numbered by order of passage as either public laws, or less frequently, private laws. Slip laws are later aggregated and published chronologically in volumes known as the United States Statutes at Large (Statutes at Large). Statutes of a general and permanent nature are then incorporated into the United States Code (U.S. Code), which arranges the statutes by subject matter into 54 titles and five appendices.
Statutes may be updated and published as amended public laws. As the statutes that underlie the U.S. Code are revised, superseded, or repealed, the provisions of the U.S. Code are also updated to reflect these changes. In these instances, the authoritative language remains the enacting statute, or the "base law." However, some titles of the U.S. Code have been passed into "positive law," meaning the law exists as it does in the U.S. Code and the title itself is the authoritative language. In these instances, it is the U.S. Code sections that are revised, superseded, or repealed, as the underlying statutes have all been revoked.
In arranging statutes by subject rather than date, the U.S. Code may be more convenient to search than the Statutes at Large. Moreover, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel publishes tools known as "Tables," to assist researchers in locating statutes, as well identifying statutes that may have been amended, omitted, transferred, or repealed. Nevertheless, certain laws are not added to the U.S. Code, such as laws appropriating funds, and thus researchers will often need to search laws in the other forms discussed herein.