U.S. Code

A multivolume publication of the text of statutes enacted by Congress.

Until 1926, the positive law for federal legislation was published in one volume of the Revised Statutes of 1875, and then in each sub-sequent volume of the statutes at large. In 1925, Congress authorized the preparation of the U.S. Code and appointed a revisor of statutes to extract all the sections of the Revised Statutes of 1875 that had not been repealed and all of the public laws that were still in effect from the Statutes at Large since 1873. These laws were rearranged into fifty titles and published in four volumes as the U.S. Code, 1926 edition. Thereafter, an annual cumulative supplement containing all the laws passed since 1926 was published. In 1932, a new edition of the code was published, which incorporated the cumulative supplements to the 1926 edition. This became the U.S. Code, 1932 edition. Every six years, a new edition of the code is published, incorporating the annual cumulative supplements prepared since the previous edition.