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Official compilation of U. S. federal statutes

The United States Code (formally the Code of Laws of the United States of America) is the official codification of the general and permanent federal statutes of the United States. It contains 53 titles (Titles 1–54, excepting Title 53, which is reserved for a proposed title on small business). The main edition is published every six years by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives, and cumulative supplements are published annually. The official version of these laws appears in the United States Statutes at Large, a chronological, uncodified compilation.

The official text of an Act of Congress is that of the "enrolled bill" (traditionally printed on parchment) presented to the President for his signature or disapproval. Upon enactment of a law, the original bill is delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). After authorization from the OFR, copies are distributed as "slip laws" (as unbound, individually paginated pamphlets) by the Government Publishing Office (GPO). The OFR assembles annual volumes of the enacted laws and publishes them as the United States Statutes at Large. By law, the text of the Statutes at Large is "legal evidence" of the laws enacted by Congress. Slip laws are also competent evidence. The Statutes at Large, however, is not a convenient tool for legal research. It is arranged strictly in chronological order; statutes addressing related topics may be scattered across many volumes, and are not consolidated with later amendments. Statutes often repeal or amend earlier laws, and extensive cross referencing is required to determine what laws are in force at any given time.

The authority for the material in the United States Code comes from its enactment through the legislative process and not from its presentation in the Code. For example, the United States Code omitted for decades, apparently because it was thought to have been repealed. In its 1993 ruling in U. S. National Bank of Oregon v. Independent Insurance Agents of America, the Supreme Court ruled that § 92 was still valid law. A positive law title is a title that is itself a federal statute, that is to say that it is one that has been enacted and codified into law by the United States Congress. The title itself has been enacted. By contrast, a non positive law title is a title that has not been codified into federal law, and is instead merely an editorial compilation of individually enacted federal statutes. By law, those titles of the United States Code that have not been enacted into positive law are "prima facie evidence" of the law in effect. The United States Statutes at Large remains the ultimate authority. If a dispute arises as to the accuracy or completeness of the codification of an unenacted title, the courts will turn to the language in the United States Statutes at Large. In case of a conflict between the text of the Statutes at Large and the text of a provision of the United States Code that has not been enacted as positive law, the text of the Statutes at Large takes precedence. In contrast, if Congress enacts a particular title (or other component) of the Code into positive law, the enactment repeals all of the previous Acts of Congress from which that title of the Code derives; in their place, Congress gives the title of the Code itself the force of law. This process makes that title of the United States Code "legal evidence" of the law in force. Where a title has been enacted into positive law, a court may neither permit nor require proof of the underlying original Acts of Congress. The distinction between enacted and unenacted titles is largely academic because the Code is nearly always accurate. The United States Code is routinely cited by the Supreme Court and other federal courts without mentioning this theoretical caveat. On a day to day basis, very few lawyers cross reference the Code to the Statutes at Large. Attempting to capitalize on the possibility that the text of the United States Code can differ from the United States Statutes at Large, Bancroft Whitney for many years published a series of volumes known as United States Code Service (USCS), which used the actual text of the United States Statutes at Large; the series is now published by the Michie Company after Bancroft Whitney parent Thomson Corporation divested the title as a condition of acquiring West.

Only "general and permanent" laws are codified in the United States Code; the Code does not usually include provisions that apply only to a limited number of people (a private law) or for a limited time, such as most appropriation acts or budget laws, which apply only for a single fiscal year. If these limited provisions are significant, however, they may be printed as "notes" underneath related sections of the Code. The codification is based on the content of the laws, however, not the vehicle by which they are adopted; so, for instance, if an appropriations act contains substantive, permanent provisions (as is sometimes the case), these provisions will be incorporated into the Code even though they were adopted as part of a non permanent enactment.

Early efforts at codifying the Acts of Congress were undertaken by private publishers; these were useful shortcuts for research purposes, but had no official status. Congress undertook an official codification called the Revised Statutes of the United States approved June 22, 1874, for the laws in effect as of December 1, 1873. Congress re enacted a corrected version in 1878. The 1874 version of the Revised Statutes were enacted as positive law, but the 1878 version was not and subsequent enactments of Congress were not incorporated into the official code, so that over time researchers once again had to delve through many volumes of the Statutes at Large. According to the preface to the Code, "From 1897 to 1907 a commission was engaged in an effort to codify the great mass of accumulating legislation. The work of the commission involved an expenditure of over $300,000, but was never carried to completion." Only the Criminal Code of 1909 and the Judicial Code of 1911 were enacted. In the absence of a comprehensive official code, private publishers once again collected the more recent statutes into unofficial codes. The first edition of the United States Code (published as Statutes at Large Volume 44, Part 1) includes cross reference tables between the USC and two of these unofficial codes, United States Compiled Statutes Annotated by West Publishing Co. and Federal Statutes Annotated by Edward Thompson Co.

During the 1920s, some members of Congress revived the codification project, resulting in the approval of the United States Code by Congress in 1926. The official version of the Code is published by the LRC (Office of the Law Revision Counsel) as a series of paper volumes. The first edition of the Code was contained in a single bound volume; today, it spans several large volumes. Normally, a new edition of the Code is issued every six years, with annual cumulative supplements identifying the changes made by Congress since the last "main edition" was published. The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema of the XML was designed to be consistent with the Akoma Ntoso project (from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) XML schema, and the OASIS LegalDocML technical committee standard will be based upon Akoma Ntoso. A number of other online versions are freely available, such as Cornell's Legal Information Institute.

There are conflicting opinions on the number of federal crimes, In 1982, the U. S. Department of Justice could not come up with a number, but estimated 3,000 crimes in the United States Code. In 1998, the American Bar Association said that it was likely much higher than 3,000, but did not give a specific estimate. When staff for a task force of the U. S. House Judiciary Committee asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to update its 2008 calculation of criminal offenses in the USC in 2013, the CRS responded that they lack the manpower and resources to accomplish the task.

The Code generally contains only those Acts of Congress, or statutes, designated as public laws. The Code itself does not include Executive Orders or other executive branch documents related to the statutes, or rules promulgated by the courts. However, such related material is sometimes contained in notes to relevant statutory sections or in appendices. The Code does not include statutes designated at enactment as private laws, nor statutes that are considered temporary in nature, such as appropriations. These laws are included in the Statutes at Large for the year of enactment. Regulations promulgated by executive agencies through the rulemaking process set out in the Administrative Procedure Act are published chronologically in the Federal Register and then codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Similarly, state statutes and regulations are often codified into state specific codes.