your research professors, and
I'm here to talk to you today about
publication of statutes.
You might see us refer to statutes, in
two different ways with two different
citation formats.
So this video is intended to help clarify
this.
Let's talk first about vocabulary.
The first thing we need to talk about is
what is an act.
An act is a law passed, by the
legislature,
be it the U.S. Congress or the state
legislatures.
And then it has to go the executive branch
for approval.
Now this is part of the checks and
balances
system, that you should learn about in
another video.
A statute is a synonym of act.
So they're pretty much the same thing, but
you often will hear us
refer to acts in their entirety as, The
Civil Rights Act, the Patriot Act.
And that means that we're really talking
about it as was passed by Congress.
You may also hear us refer to sections of
the Code.
Or a specific statute for today, which is
part of the United States Code.
Which has been codified and arranged by
subject.
So we are going to talk today about that
publication process.
But first, lets take a quick look at some
common abbreviations.
The first is public law.
Now, the public law, is going to be the
very first stage of publication.
It would then go to the statutes at
large, with the abbreviation, Stat, in
your citations.
Finally, we have the US code, or
U.S.C. You may also see state statutes
abbreviated.
Such as, FLA Stat, and, that's referring
to the Florida statutes in their qualified
version.
So looking at the publication process.
The first thing we have, is the
legislature.
In this case the US Congress, passing a
bill.
And we have two houses.
We have the House of Representative.
And we have the US Senate.
Both the House and the Senate, have to
agree to the wording of their statue.
Before, it moves on to executive branch,
in this case, the US president.
The president can sign the bill.
He can veto it, and send it back to
Congress, or
he can just do nothing and eventually it
will become law.
Once we have a law.
We have a public law.
This means that it's published on its own,
not in a compilation.
And the only page numbers are one through
the end of that particular act.
And it really doesn't have a formal place
of publication.
All of the laws for Congressional term are
brought
together and published in the statutes at
large, Stat.
So these will be a chronological
publication.
Because every time a public law is passed,
it's assigned a number.
As we go along, so you'll have 323 and
then 324, 325, etc.
So those will be published chronologically
in our statutes at large.
You'll have numbering that goes through
the range of the
statutes at large volume instead of for
each individual bill.
Now there is no index to the statutes at
large, so
it really makes it hard to find anything
that you're looking for.
You have to know your citation pretty
much, or
you can use the, Table of Contents for
each volume.
That can be a little tricky.
So, what we did was, as a nation we
divided up
the acts, by subject, and this allows us
to keep them up to date as well.
So, for instance, we have the Higher
Education Act of 1965,
I believe it was, and then we updated it
again in 2008.
With the higher education equal
opportunity act.
So we've brought those together so they're
in one
place, and we know what is the current
law.
And that's what we call the U.S. Code.
The office of the law revision council, at
the federal level, takes all the acts
that are passed for a term, chops it up,
and puts into the United States code.
That makes it much easier to find, because
it's arranged by subject.
There's an index, which is very helpful,
because you can look things up by keyword.
And there's also a table of contents for
the entire 51 titles.
So, that is the basic structure for
publication.
If you want to learn more about either the
publication process or how
a bill becomes a law, we'll put some
handouts for you on the website.
So you can ease your curiosity.
Until then, happy researching.
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