ANSWERS: 1
  • They are published first in chronological order and, then, are later codified by subject. Each law passed is designated as either a public law or a private law, and is assigned a number indicating the chronological order in which it is passed. Public laws are designed to affect the general public while private laws are passed to meet the special needs of an individual or group. Only public laws become part of the statutory code, the U.S. Code. Both will appear in separate series in the session laws, the U.S. Statutes at Large. As bound volume sources of session laws, The Library maintains the U.S. Statutes at Large (K42 .A3), which are published by the Government Printing Office and the West publication that features selective legislative history documents, which is entitled the United States Code and Congressional Administrative News (K35 .U5). The Library also provides access to session laws within the paperback advance sheets of two commercial publications: the United States Code and Congressional Administrative News (K35 .U5) and the U.S. Code Annotated (KF 62 .W45) Session laws in the form of slip laws constitute the official text of a statute and are maintained after the U.S. Statutes at Large in the stacks. The public and private law numbers run in sequence, starting anew at the beginning of each Congress. Since 1957, the public laws have been prefixed for easier identification by the number of the Congress. For example, the first Public Law of the 106th Congress is designated Public Law (or PL) 106-1. Prior to 1957, public and private laws had citations as chapters and as a Statute at Large. A typical statute cite will read, for example, (both before and after the 1957 change in numbering public laws) as 99 Stat. 713, which meant that it could be located in volume 99 of the U.S. Statutes at Large at page 713. Tables that correlate Public Law and U.S. Statutes at Large cites are published in the Table volumes of the U.S. Code Annotated and at the end of each volume that completes a legislative session of the United States Code and Congressional Administrative News (K35 .U5). These tables will also provide access to specific citations to the codifications embodied in the U.S. Code and the U.S. Code Annotated. The U.S. Code, the U.S. Code Annotated, the United States Code and Congressional Administrative News, and the U.S. Statutes at Large contain subject indices and Popular Name Tables to facilitate the location of specific statutes. The U.S. Code Annotated has several features that appear with each statute which none of the other statutory search tools contain. These include:

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