About this site
A conceptual redesign of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel's United States Code website, built entirely from the official USLM downloads. It is not an official publication of the United States government.
Where to go for the official text
The Office of the Law Revision Counsel publishes the Code and is the authority on it. If you need the official text, or the currency of a title, go to uscode.house.gov. Nothing here amends, replaces or interprets what they publish. Every page on this site names the release point its text came from and links to the source file it was parsed from.
What it is for
This site provides an updated, navigable version of the United States Code, representing the codification of federal statutes as of a given date. When new laws are passed by Congress, the OLRC classifies each provision to determine where it will go in the U.S. Code; then the office executes the changes into the code along with editorial notes. The Code, with these updates, is republished in full at every "release point", and each release point is named for the last public law it includes. This site indexes each section of the Code at each release point, and allows you to search by keyword or by citation.
The site is built around a well-defined API that provides a 1:1 correspondence between a textual citation and a URL. The URL scheme follows the official XML structure
in the United States Legislative Markup (USLM), and the url corresponds to the
@identifier used in the official XML. For example, /us/usc/t16/s45f/c/5 is subsection (c)(5) of section 45f of title 16; add ?release= or ?date= and you get that provision as it was as of that date or release. The citation is
human-readable and it still works later. In addition, each provision carries a unique ID and that ID can also be used to
pull up the provision, in the context of its section, on this site.
How to check anything on it
- Release points — every release point published electronically by OLRC, and which titles each changed
- The API — the same data as JSON, or as the source XML
- Search and citation syntax — how to use the search box on each page
- The official downloads this site is built from
Every section page links to its own version history, listing each release point where the text changed, and to an automated redline (difference) between any two of them. If something here is wrong, that is where it will show.
How it is built
The corpus is the official USLM XML — 3,153 title-releases across 58 titles and 381 release points — parsed and stored section by section. Text that a release point republished unchanged is stored once, avoiding duplication. About 91% of the stored text is a republication, because the Code republishes every title at every release point, whether there were changes to it or not.