Process for Statutes

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Statutes are classified as either civil or criminal.

• Criminal - impose various types of punishments for violations. Only the government can bring this charge, which may subject a person to imprisonment, and does not require harm for a violation


• Civil - the government or a private party may bring a claim under a civil statute, and a violation does not provide for imprisonment. It usually requires harm done to one party.

Statutes may prohibit or require conduct.

• Prohibiting conduct - ex: drunk driving.


• Requiring conduct - ex: sex offenders register with a government entity


• Allowing conduct - ex: "a landlord may require a security deposit for each rental unit.

Even if a court disagrees with a statute's purpose of policy they must follow and apply it as written.

Bill to Law

Once a bill is enacted it receives a public law number. Ex:

101-336

This public law number means that this bill was the 336th law enacted by the 101st congress.

Forms of Publication

1. Slip laws and session laws:


Slip laws are published on congress.gov and govinfo.gov immediately after a bill becomes law. All slip laws are compiled and published in books called United States Statutes at Large. Session laws are what the collection is called, because it contains all laws passed by one session of congress. These books are organised chronologically by date enacted.


2. Statutory codes
   
   A code is a collection of all current laws. Legislature enacts, repeals, and makes additions all the time, so the code contains all active laws no matter how old or new they are. A code is organised by topic.
   
   
   • Official Code - United States code is the official codification of all federal statutes in current effect. They are arranged by fifty alphabetical topics called titles. The complete code can be found on Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute or the Office of the Law Revision Council.
   
   
   
   • Unofficial Code - Published by commercial companies. There are two of them: Westlaw and LexisNexis. Federal statutes published in unofficial codes are organised the same as the official codes.
   
   
   Nearly everyone uses the unofficial codes for two reasons:
   
   
   1. Unofficial codes are updated with new statutes and amendments more frequently than the official codes.
   
   
   2. Unofficial codes are enhanced, or annotated, very helpfully with citations to other related authorities.

Public (session) laws and statutes in code

A single publication law may contain five sections or over fifty. Every public law is arranged by topic in the code. During the codification process, sections of the same public law may be places in different locations.

Citations

Federal statute sitation format:
Title Number Name of code Section number (Publisher name of database Currency of database)

State statute citation format:
Name of code Section number (Publisher name of database Currency of database)