Updates to the sections of the United States Code contained in

Title /usc_sup_01_.html of the US Code as currently published by the US Government reflects the laws passed by Congress as of .

The office of the Law Revision Counsel is responsible for the codification process, which can take as much as several years, but which starts very quickly with "classification" of recently passed legislation to corresponding US Code sections.

The table below lists the classification updates for the sections contained in , from to the most recent entry on Friday, May 2, 2008.

How to use this table

An empty table indicates that we see no relevant changes listed in the classification tables since .

Multiple entries for a section are listed most recent first, within the section.

If there are multiple sections, they are presented in section number order (original document order).

The Session Year indicates which session of Congress was responsible for the changes classified. The Congress number forms the first part of the Public Law number; each Congress has two sessions.

Abbreviations used in the Description of Change column:

• An empty field implies a standard amendment.
• "new" means a new section or new note, or all new text of an existing section or note.
• "nt" means note.
• "nt [tbl]" means note [table].
• "prec" means preceding.
• "fr" means a transfer from another section.
• "to" means a transfer to another section.
• "omitted" means the section is omitted.
• "repealed" means the section is repealed.
• "nt ed change" and "ed change" -- See the Editorial Classification Change Table (http://uscode.house.gov/classification/edct.pdf).

The Public Law field is linked to the development of the law in the Thomas system at the Library of Congress.

The Statutes at Large field is linked to the text of the law, in the context of its volume of the Statutes at Large, at the Government Printing Office. Please note that it takes a while for these pages to get posted, so for very recent legislation, you need to look at the "enrolled" version at the Thomas site (PubL link)

The Statutes at Large references have been rendered in the format used as page numbers in the Public Law web pages to which we link, to facilitate copy-paste into browser "find on this (web) page" tools. We are still working on a more direct link facility.

For serious comparison work, we suggest copying all or a portion of the Public Law text into you favorite text editor, for convenient content traversal and window control.

You will find that occassionally a specific update you notice in a Public Law listed in a classification table will already have made it into the Code. We assume this is an artifact of the LRC edit process. The LII does not edit the LRC content.

General References

See http://uscode.house.gov/ for explanations about the US Code from the folks who put it all together at the LRC. Look for information about what it is and is not, which titles are "positive law", the schedule of Supplements, etc. Under "download" you can find the source data we use here (GPO locator files) as well as PDF files that look just like the paper books (watch out for file sizes).

See http://thomas.loc.gov/ to look for changes that have not yet made it into the classification tables.