Where to find american legislation

GPO govinfo provides the full text of public and private laws from the th Congress to the current Congress. The Senate and House Document Rooms may be able to provide you with a copy of a slip law.

Check with them for availability. At the end of each session of Congress, public laws are published in annual volumes called the United States Statutes at Large , which are published by the Government Printing Office. A more timely resource for finding the text of laws as originally passed by Congress is U.

To request records under the Privacy Act, you must contact the federal agency you believe holds the records. Find other agencies and contacts for submitting your Privacy Act request. There are 9 exemptions to the information agencies must allow you to see. Two frequently-used exemptions involve:.

Congress creates and passes bills. The president then may sign those bills into law. Federal courts may review the laws to see if they agree with the Constitution. If a court finds a law is unconstitutional, it can strike it down. The United States Code contains general and permanent federal laws. It does not include regulations, decisions, or laws issued by:. New public and private laws appear in each edition of the United States Statutes at Large.

There is a new edition for each session of Congress. Find bills and resolutions introduced by the current and earlier sessions of Congress. This includes new laws that have not yet been assigned a public law number. Find laws and joint resolutions that have been assigned public law numbers. Visit the Law Library of Congress to research U. Regulations are issued by federal agencies, boards, and commissions. They explain how agencies plan to carry out laws.

Regulations are published yearly in the Code of Federal Regulations. State legislatures make the laws in each state. State courts can review these laws. If a court decides a law doesn't agree with the state's constitution, it can declare it invalid. Federal courts do not write or pass laws.

This happens through courts' interpretations of federal and state laws and the Constitution. An example is the U. Board of Education of Topeka. The court decided that state laws which segregated public school students by race violated the 14th Amendment. These are known as the Reconstruction Amendments, since they were passed shortly after the Civil War.

The Reconstruction Amendments abolished slavery, established the key doctrines of due process and equal protection, and extended voting rights to former slaves.

Code contains the laws that are passed by the U. Congress, which includes the U. House of Representatives and the U. These laws and the provisions of the U. Constitution are often interpreted by federal courts throughout the U. There are three tiers of federal courts. Federal trial courts are known as federal district courts. Decisions by federal district courts may be appealed to the U. Courts of Appeals, which are divided into 13 circuits. Finally, the U.

Supreme Court may review decisions by U.