Search and citation guide

There is one box in the header and it answers two kinds of question. Type a citation and it goes straight there; type anything else and it searches the text. You do not have to tell it which you meant — it reads what you wrote.

Both halves can also ask about the past. A citation can name a release point and land on the provision as it stood then, and a search can name one too — though only through the URL for now, and with a limit worth reading first. See searching at a release point.

Going to a citation

Each of these forms works, and each is followed by the official identifier it resolves to. Select any example to try it.

• The standard citation

  11 U.S.C. § 523 → goes to /us/usc/t11/s523

  Title, U.S.C., section. The section symbol is optional, so is every period, and so is the spacing: 11 usc 523 and 11 U. S. C. 523 are the same citation.

• Down to a subdivision

  11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(1)(B)(ii) → goes to /us/usc/t11/s523/a/1/B/ii

  Parentheses become path segments, as deep as you write them. Case is kept: (B) is not (b), because the official identifiers distinguish the two.

• A section number that is not a number

  16 usc 45f(c)(5) → goes to /us/usc/t16/s45f/c/5

  Section numbers carry letters — 45f, 1a, 78j-1 — and are matched as written rather than as an integer.

• A hyphenated section number

  42 USC 2000e-2 → goes to /us/usc/t42/s2000e-2

  Type the hyphen your keyboard has. The official text writes these with an en dash (45a–1, U+2013), so both spellings are tried and whichever exists is what you land on.

• The inverted form

  section 523 of title 11 → goes to /us/usc/t11/s523

  The way a statute refers to itself in prose. Sec., §, and a subdivision all work here too: Sec. 523(a) of Title 11.

• Title last

  Section 14123(a)(2), 49 U.S.C. → goes to /us/usc/t49/s14123/a/2

  The abbreviated inverted form used in the Office of the Law Revision Counsel's own notes.

• Title and section, nothing else

  11/523 → goes to /us/usc/t11/s523

  The fastest thing to type. Subdivisions follow as slashes: 11/523/a/1.

• The identifier itself

  /us/usc/t16/s45f/c/5 → goes to /us/usc/t16/s45f/c/5

  The official USLM @identifier, pasted straight in — which is also this site's URL scheme, so a URL from anywhere on the site works in the box. Fragments of one do too: t16/s45f.

• A chapter or other level

  11 usc ch. 5 → goes to /us/usc/t11/ch5

  Chapters, subchapters, parts, subparts and subtitles, spelled out or abbreviated. This lands on that level's table of contents rather than on a section.

• A level, written the long way

  title 11, chapter 5 → goes to /us/usc/t11/ch5

  The same destination, in the form prose tends to use.

• A whole title

  title 11 → goes to /us/usc/t11

  The title's table of contents. 11 usc, with nothing after it, means the same thing.

• A note

  11 usc 523 note → goes to /us/usc/t11/s523

  The trailing note is recognised and you land on the section, whose notes are on the page. There is no separate route for notes, so the word is read and then set aside.

• A run of sections

  16 usc 45f et seq. → goes to /us/usc/t16/s45f

  et seq. names a run starting at a section. You land at its start; there is no view of a range.

• Wrapped in brackets

  (11 U.S.C. 523) → goes to /us/usc/t11/s523

  Enclosing brackets, quotes and trailing punctuation are stripped, so a citation pasted from the middle of a sentence works. Brackets that belong to the citation are kept: 523(a)(1) is read as a subdivision.

Two things that will catch you out

• 523 not read as a citation

  A section number with no title is unresolvable, because many titles have a § 523. Typed on its own it is treated as a word and searched for.

• 5 U.S.C. App. 3 parses, finds nothing

  Appendix citations parse and then find nothing. The five appendix titles are published under the enacting instrument, not a flat section number: 0 of 461 appendix sections use this shape, and they look like /us/usc/t5a/pl/92/463/s1. Getting from one form to the other needs a lookup table this site does not have.

Add a release point to any of these — ?release=119-99 or ?date=07/12/2026 — and you land on the provision as it stood then.

Searching the text

By default a search matches the words you typed, and every one of them has to appear. The operators below are how you loosen that deliberately — including asking for near-spellings when you are not sure how a word is written.

Operators

• "…" Exact phrase

  The words in that order, next to each other. Without the quotes both words must still appear, but anywhere in the provision and in any order.

  "navigable waters"

• ~n Misspellings

  Also matches words within n single-character edits — one insertion, deletion, substitution or transposition each. Use it when you are unsure of a spelling. Keep n at 1 or 2: at 2, six-letter words start matching genuinely unrelated ones.

  conservation~1

• * Word beginning

  Matches any word starting with those letters — navigable, navigability, navigation. Only at the end of a word; a leading * is not supported, because matching every word by its ending would mean scanning the whole index.

  navigab*

• "…"~n Words near each other

  The phrase, but allowing up to n words in between and in either order. Useful when you know two terms belong together but not exactly how they are written.

  "secretary interior"~3

• - Exclude

  Excludes provisions containing the word. The minus goes immediately before the word, with no space after it.

  water -pollution

• + Require

  Requires the word. Rarely needed here, because every word is already required by default — it matters only when you have written an | somewhere in the same query.

  +wildlife +refuge

• | Either word

  Matches provisions containing either word. Use it to loosen a search that is finding too little.

  forest | grassland

• ( ) Grouping

  Groups terms so the operators apply the way you meant, exactly as in arithmetic.

  (forest | grassland) -timber

• \ Literal character

  Treats the next character as text rather than as an operator — for searching a phrase that genuinely contains a hyphen or a quotation mark.

  \-

• Space

  A space separates terms, and all of them must be present. This is the default, so every word you add narrows the search.

  public lands

What is searched

The text of sections and the headings above them — chapters, subchapters, parts. A search covers the law currently in force unless you name a release point, which is done from the URL and is described in the next section.

Operators combine, and grouping works the way it does in arithmetic: (forest | grassland) -timber .

Searching at a release point

You can search the Code as it stood at a past release point. This is the one place on the site where the answer is not yet complete, so both halves are set out below: how to ask, and what comes back.

The search box has no control for this yet, so you add the release point to the results URL. There are two parameters, the same two a citation URL takes: the label of a release point, or a date.

• &release= by release point

  The label as the Office of the Law Revision Counsel writes it, awkward ones included: 119-102not101 is current through Public Law 119-102 except 119-101. The release points page lists them all.

  ?q=conservation&release=119-99

• &date= by date

  MM/DD/YYYY, resolved to the release point in force on that day. Usually easier than looking up a label. The results page names the release point it landed on, so you can see which one answered.

  ?q=conservation&date=06/12/2026

Asking what cites a provision

Prefix a citation with cites — cites 26 usc 501 — and the search looks for provisions that refer to it. This is a keyword search over the citation's text for now, not a real cross-reference index, and the results page says so rather than letting the answer pass for the finished thing.