BEV BUTULA: Site makes statutory research easy

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Did you know that the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives maintains a classification table for the U.S. Code?

Federal laws consist of numerous sections, and each of those sections may appear somewhere different within the code. Researchers occasionally need to determine where to locate those individual sections. The classification table is a great tool to determine where a section of a public law now appears in the U.S. Code.

The Law Revision Counsel also makes prior classification tables, back to 1995, available on the site.

Another resource available on the Law Revision Counsel’s website is the Popular Name Tool. The tool can direct the researcher to a public law when only the name or acronym is known. For example, let’s say the user wants to review the U.S. Safe Web Act. The actual name of the act is the Undertaking Spam, Spyware, And Fraud Enforcement With Enforcers beyond Borders Act. Searching the popular name list will quickly identify the act and take the user to Pub. L. 109-455.

Interested in finding other websites to complete your federal statutory research? Check out the U.S. Law page from the Law Library of Congress or “A Federal Statutory Research Guide,” which is part of the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington D.C.’s Legislative Source Book.