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spike
This is what the US Code Is...by definition and in detail...not from my words...but by using wikipedia as reference (so there is no question): Title 38
<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading">United States Code</h1> The United States Code (U.S.C.) is a compilation and codification of the general and permanent federal law of the United States. [1]
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Codification process
The official text of an Act of Congress is that of the "enrolled bill" (traditionally printed on parchment) presented to the President for his signature or disapproval. Upon enactment of a law, the original bill is delivered to the Archivist of the United States, and duplicate copies are issued in pamphlet form as "slip laws" by the Government Printing Office (GPO). The Archivist assembles annual volumes of the enacted laws and publishes them as the United States Statutes at Large. By law, the text of the Statutes at Large is "legal evidence" of the laws enacted by Congress. (According to 1 USC Sec. 113 slip laws are also competent evidence.)
The Statutes at Large, however, is not a convenient tool for legal research. It is arranged strictly in chronological order, so that statutes addressing related topics may be scattered across many volumes. Statutes often repeal or amend earlier laws, and extensive cross-referencing is required to determine what laws are in effect at any given time.
The United States Code is the result of an effort to make finding relevant and effective statutes simpler by reorganizing them by subject matter, and eliminating expired and amended sections. The Code is maintained by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (LRC) of the U.S. House of Representatives. The LRC determines which statutes in the United States Statutes at Large should be codified, and which existing statutes are affected by amendments or repeals, or have simply expired by their own terms. The LRC updates the Code accordingly.
Because of this codification approach, a single named statute (like the Taft-Hartley Act, or the Embargo Act) may or may not appear in a single place in the Code. Often, complex legislation bundles a series of provisions together as a means of addressing a social or governmental problem; those provisions often fall in different logical areas of the Code.
For example, a bill providing relief for family farms might affect items in Title 7 (Agriculture), Title 26 (Tax), and Title 43 (Public Lands). When the bill is codified, its various provisions might well be placed in different parts of those various Titles. Traces of this process are generally found in the Notes accompanying the "lead section" associated with the popular name, and in cross-reference tables that identify Code sections corresponding to particular Acts of Congress.
Usually the individual sections of a statute are incorporated into the Code exactly as enacted; however, sometimes editorial changes are made by the LRC (for instance, the phrase "the date of enactment of this Act" is replaced by the actual date). Though authorized by statute, these changes do not constitute positive law.[1]
Legal status
By law, those titles of the United States Code that have not been enacted into positive law are "prima facie evidence"[2] of the law in effect. The Statutes at Large remains the ultimate authority. If a dispute arises as to the accuracy or completeness of the codification of an unenacted title, the courts will turn to the language in the United States Statutes at Large. Where a title has been enacted into positive law, however, a court may neither permit nor require proof of the underlying original statutes.[3] The distinction between enacted and unenacted titles is largely academic because the Code is nearly always accurate. The United States Code is routinely cited by the Supreme Court and other federal courts without mentioning this theoretical caveat. On a day-to-day basis, very few lawyers cross-reference the Code to the Statutes at Large.
The authority for the material in the United States Code comes from its enactment through the legislative process and not from its presentation in the Code. For example, the United States Code inadvertently omitted 12 U.S.C. § 92 for decades, even after Congress amended it in 1982. In its 1993 ruling in U.S. National Bank of Oregon v. Independent Insurance Agents of America, the Supreme Court ruled that section 92 was still valid law.[4]
The LRC continues the process of revising, updating, and restating the existing body of statutory law in codified form. As the LRC completes particular areas of the law, it proposes that the Congress enact those titles of the Code as "positive law". If a particular title of the United States Code is enacted into law, the enactment repeals all previous enactments on the subject (including those found in the Statutes at Large), thereby making that title of the United States Code "legal evidence"[5] of the law in force.
Uncodified statutes
Only "general and permanent" laws are codified; the Code does not usually include provisions that apply only to a limited number of people (a private law) or for a limited time, such as most appropriation acts or budget laws, which apply only for a single fiscal year. If these limited provisions are significant, however, they may be printed as "notes" underneath related sections of the Code. The codification is based on the content of the laws, however, not the vehicle by which they are adopted; so, for instance, if an appropriations act contains substantive, permanent legislation (as is sometimes the case), the permanent provisions will be incorporated into the Code even though they were adopted as part of a non-permanent enactment.[6]
Organization
The Code is divided into 50 titles (listed below), which deal with broad, logically organized areas of legislation. Titles may optionally be divided into subtitles, parts, subparts, chapters, and subchapters. All titles have sections (represented by a §), as their basic coherent units, though sections are often divided into (from largest to smallest) subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs, clauses, subclauses, items, and subitems. Congress, by convention, names a particular subdivision of a section according to its largest element. For example, "subsection ©(3)(B)(iv)" is not a subsection but a clause, namely clause (iv) of subparagraph (:P of paragraph (3) of subsection ©; if the identity of the subsection and paragraph were clear from the context, one would refer to the clause as "subparagraph (:((iv)."
Not all titles use the same series of subdivisions above the section level, and they may arrange them in different order. For example, in Title 26 (the tax code), the order of subdivision runs:
In Title 38 (Veteran's Benefits) the order runs Title - Part - Chapter - Subchapter - Section. Put another way, the Title is always the largest division of the Code, and the section the smallest (except for subsections, paragraphs, clauses, etc.), but intermediate levels vary in both number and sequence from Title to Title.
The word "title" in this context is roughly akin to a printed "volume," although many of the larger titles span multiple volumes. Similarly, no particular size or length is associated with other subdivisions; a section might run several pages in print, or just a sentence or two. Some subdivisions within particular titles acquire meaning of their own; for example, it's common for lawyers to refer to a "Chapter 11" bankruptcy or a "Subchapter K" partnership.
According to one style manual[7], a sample citation would be Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U.S.C. § 552a (2006). A lawyer would read that out loud as "Title five, United States Code, section five hundred fifty-two A." or simply "5 USC five hundred fifty-two A."
When sections are repealed, their text is deleted and replaced by a note summarizing what used to be there. This is necessary so that lawyers reading old cases can understand what the cases are talking about. As a result, some portions of the Code consist entirely of empty chapters full of historical notes. For example, Title 8, Chapter 7 is labeled "Exclusion of Chinese." This contains historical notes relating to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is no longer in effect.
Versions and history
Early compilations
Early efforts at codifying the Acts of Congress were undertaken by private publishers; these were useful shortcuts for research purposes, but had no official status. Congress undertook an official codification called the Revised Statutes approved June 22, 1874, for the laws in effect as of December 1, 1873. Congress re-enacted a corrected version in 1878. The Revised Statutes were enacted as positive law, but subsequent enactments were not incorporated into the official code, so that over time researchers once again had to delve through many volumes of the Statutes at Large. According to the preface to the Code, "From 1897 to 1907 a commission was engaged in an effort to codify the great mass of accumulating legislation. The work of the commission involved an expenditure of over $300,000, but was never carried to completion."
Official code
During the 1920s, some members of Congress revived the codification project, resulting in the approval of the United States Code by Congress in 1926.
The official version of the Code is published by the LRC as a series of paper volumes. The first edition of the Code was contained in a single bound volume; today, it spans several large volumes. Normally, a new edition of the Code is issued every six years, with annual supplements identifying the changes made by legislation in each session of Congress.
In practice, however, the Code is kept up-to-date on a near-current basis as laws are enacted, and notes are printed in the margins of the slip laws indicating where each section will be codified, if at all. Both the LRC and the GPO offer electronic versions of the Code to the public. The electronic version may be as much as 18 months behind current legislation, but it is the most up to date official version.
Internet versions
A number of other online versions are freely available, including those at Findlaw.com and at Cornell's Legal Information Institute.
Annotated codes
Practicing lawyers who can afford them almost always use an annotated version of the U.S. Code from a private company. The two leading annotated versions are the United States Code Annotated, abbreviated as U.S.C.A., and the United States Code Service, abbreviated as U.S.C.S. The U.S.C.A. is published by Thomson West, and U.S.C.S. is published by LexisNexis (part of Reed Elsevier), although the current edition was originated by the Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Co. See Wexis. These annotated versions contain notes following each section of the law, which summarize relevant court decisions, law review articles, and other authorities, and may also include uncodified provisions that are part of the Public Laws. The publishers of these versions frequently issue supplements that contain newly-enacted laws, which may not yet have appeared in an official published version of the Code. When an attorney is viewing an annotated code on an online service, such as Westlaw or LexisNexis, all the citations in the annotations are hyperlinked to the referenced opinions and documents.
Other relevant codifications
The Code generally contains only those Acts of Congress known as public laws (although the notes sometimes contain related Executive Orders and other presidential documents). The Code does not contain statutes known as private laws. It also does not contain statutes that are not considered permanent (such as appropriations); nor does it contain regulations adopted by executive agencies through the rulemaking process set out in the Administrative Procedure Act. These regulations are published chronologically in the Federal Register and are then compiled by topic or subject matter in the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.), which constitutes an additional important source of federal law.
Parts of interest
[*]The Uniform Code of Military Justice is contained in Title 10, Chapter 47. It defines infractions such as going AWOL and contains the popularly-known phrase, "Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman."
[*]Title 11 is the Bankruptcy Code. Some of the different types of bankruptcy are commonly referred to simply by their chapter numbers:
[*]Chapter 7
[*]Chapter 11
[*]Chapter 13
[*]Title 18 deals with federal crimes.
[*]Title 26 is also known as the Internal Revenue Code. Much of Title 26 is administered and enforced by the Internal Revenue Service and is one of the largest portions of the Code.
[*]Title 28 governs procedure in the United States federal courts.
[*]Title 42 is a lengthy title which includes statutes governing several large federal government programs like Social Security and Medicare. One provision, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, is the basis for a wide range of federal civil rights actions in federal courts; it is the codification of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Section 1983 cases include suits alleging use of excessive force by police and First Amendment suits against public schools to maintain church/state separation. Section 1983 itself is quite short; the annotations (i.e., the digests and summaries of court decisions interpreting it), however, span several volumes.
Titles
Titles that have been enacted into positive law are indicated by blue shading below.
Title 1 General Provisions Title 2 The Congress Title 3 The President Title 4 Flag and Seal, Seat Of Government., and the States Title 5 Government Organization and Employees* Title 6
(original) Surety Bonds (repealed)
(Enacted into positive law by the 80th Congress in 1947; combined into Title 31 when it was enacted into positive law.) Title 6 Domestic Security Title 7 Agriculture Title 8 Aliens and Nationality Title 9 Arbitration Title 10 Armed Forces (including the Uniform Code of Military Justice) Title 11 Bankruptcy Title 12 Banks and Banking Title 13 Census Title 14 Coast Guard Title 15 Commerce and Trade Title 16 Conservation Title 17 Copyrights Title 18 Crimes and Criminal Procedure* Title 19 Customs Duties Title 20 Education Title 21 Food and Drugs Title 22 Foreign Relations and Intercourse Title 23 Highways Title 24 Hospitals and Asylums Title 25 Indians Title 26 Internal Revenue Code Title 27 Intoxicating Liquors Title 28 Judiciary and Judicial Procedure Title 29 Labor Title 30 Mineral Lands and Mining Title 31 Money and Finance Title 32 National Guard Title 33 Navigation and Navigable Waters Title 34 Navy (repealed) Title 35 Patents Title 36 Patriotic Societies and Observances Title 37 Pay and Allowances Of the Uniformed Services Title 38 Veterans' Benefits Title 39 Postal Service Title 40 Public Buildings, Properties, and Works Title 41 Public Contracts Title 42 The Public Health and Welfare Title 43 Public Lands Title 44 Public Printing and Documents Title 45 Railroads Title 46 Shipping* Title 47 Telegraphs, Telephones, and Radiotelegraphs Title 48 Territories and Insular Possessions Title 49 Transportation
(enacted into positive law in stages; Title IV in 1978, Title I in 1983, and Titles II, III, and V-X in 1994) Title 50 War and National Defense
This is what the CFR Is.....by definition and in detail...not from my words....but by using wikipedia as reference (so there is no question): Title 38
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is the codification of the general and permanent rules and regulations (sometimes called administrative law) published in the Federal Register by the executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government of the United States. The CFR is published by the Office of the Federal Register, an agency of the National Archives and Records Administration.
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Background
Administrative law exists because the United States Congress often grants broad authority to executive branch agencies to interpret the statutes in the United States Code (and in uncodified statutes) which the agencies are entrusted with enforcing. Congress may be too busy or congested to micromanage the jurisdiction of those agencies by writing statutes that cover every possible detail, or Congress may determine that the technical specialists at the agency are best equipped to develop detailed applications of statutes to particular fact patterns as they arise.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, the agencies are permitted to promulgate detailed rules and regulations through a public "rulemaking" process where the public is allowed to comment, known as public information. After a period of time, the rules and regulations are usually published in the Federal Register.
Effect of administrative law
The regulations are treated by the courts as being as legally binding as statutory law, provided the regulations are a reasonable interpretation of the underlying statutes. This "reasonable interpretation" test or Chevron doctrine was articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision (6 voting, 3 recused) involving a challenge to new Clean Air Act regulations promulgated by the Reagan administration in 1981. See Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc..[1]
For example, if Congress passed a law that simply stated that there are not to be "excessive" levels of mercury in any significant body of water in the United States (but defined things no further), an entity designated, as part of the law, to enforce it (probably the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)) could define in a scientific way what an excessive level of mercury is, as well as what constitutes a significant body of water. The Agency's definitions, and its plan of enforcement for what Congress intended (along with listed penalties for violation coming from Congress unless Congress specified otherwise) will all go into the CFR.
Also, enabling legislation can be passed by Congress which gives a federal non-Congressional entity wide latitude in creating rules (law of bases). For example, the EPA could be designated by Congress to pass rules "that control harmful pollutants"; the Agency could then pass broad rules (including definitions and enforcement provisions), in the absence of existing specific laws, to control lead emissions, radon emissions, pesticide emissions, and so forth. Such rules, including any Congressional- or Agency-created definitions and enforcement provisions, will all go into the CFR.
It is important to understand that the CFR itself is written by lawyers for interpretation by lawyers and judges, and like statutes, must be carefully drafted in highly technical language in order to have effective broad application yet limit the availability of loopholes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of federal government employees are not lawyers, and it would ask too much to force them to directly read, interpret, and apply the convoluted content of the CFR on a daily basis. Therefore, nearly all federal agencies have in-house counsel draft one or more internal manuals in plain English which set out daily internal operating procedures in very simple language that any layperson can follow. While such manuals do not really have the force of law, they are often the law as far as most employees and customers of such agencies are concerned, unless and until a dissatisfied customer of an agency appeals to a supervisor who does understand the CFR and the USC (or eventually sues the agency in court).
Publication of administrative law
The rules and regulations are first promulgated or published in the Federal Register, and are later organized by topic or subject matter and are incorporated into the CFR.
Organization and printing schedule
The CFR is a multi-volume set divided into 50 titles that represent broad areas subject to Federal regulation. While new regulations are continually becoming effective, the physical printing of the CFR is updated on a set schedule. Each volume of the CFR is updated once each calendar year and is issued on a quarterly basis.
[*]Titles 1–16 are updated on January 1
[*]Titles 17–27 are updated on April 1
[*]Titles 28–41 are updated on July 1
[*]Titles 42–50 are updated on October 1
When finalized, new regulations are published in the Federal Register with CFR part numbers, such as 42 CFR 260.11(a), that can be cited immediately, without waiting for a page number from the physical copy. An internet version of the CFR, known as e-CFR, is also maintained by NARA, and is normally current to within three days of the Federal Register.
List of Regulation Titles
[*]Title 1: General Provisions
[*]Title 2: Grants and Agreements
[*]Title 3: The President
[*]Title 4: Accounts
[*]Title 5: Administrative Personnel
[*]Title 6: Homeland Security
[*]Title 7: Agriculture
[*]Title 8: Aliens and Nationality
[*]Title 9: Animals and Animal Products
[*]Title 10: Energy
[*]Title 11: Federal Elections
[*]Title 12: Banks and Banking
[*]Title 13: Business Credit and Assistance
[*]<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Regulations" title="Federal Aviation Regulations">Title 14: Aeronautics and Space (aka the Federal Aviation Regulations, administered by the Federal Aviation Administration)
[*]Title 15: Commerce and Foreign Trade
[*]Title 16: Commercial Practices
[*]Title 17: Commodity and Securities Exchanges
[*]Title 18: Conservation of Power and Water Resources
[*]Title 19: Customs Duties
[*]Title 20: Employees' Benefits
[*]Title 21: Food and Drugs (administered by the US Food and Drug Administration and the US Drug Enforcement Administration)
[*]Title 22: Foreign Relations
[*]Title 23: Highways
[*]Title 24: Housing and Urban Development
[*]Title 25: Indians
[*]Title 26: Internal Revenue
[*]Title 27: Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms
[*]Title 28: Judicial Administration
[*]Title 29: Labor
[*]Title 30: Mineral Resources
[*]Title 31: Money and Finance: Treasury
[*]Title 32: National Defense
[*]Title 33: Navigation and Navigable Waters
[*]Title 34: Education
[*]Title 35: Reserved (formerly Panama Canal)
[*]Title 36: Parks, Forests, and Public Property
[*]Title 37: Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights
[*]Title 38: Pensions, Bonuses, and Veterans' Relief
[*]Title 39: Postal Service
[*]Title 40: Protection of Environment (administered by the United States Environmental Protection Agency)
[*]Title 41: Public Contracts and Property Management
[*]Title 42: Public health
[*]Title 43: Public Lands: Interior
[*]Title 44: Emergency Management and Assistance
[*]Title 45: Public Welfare
[*]Title 46: Shipping
[*]Title 47: Telecommunication
[*]Title 48: Federal Acquisition Regulations System
[*]Title 49: Transportation
[*]Title 50: Wildlife and Fisheries
M21-1
According to http://www.warms.vba.va.gov/M21_1.html#a Part 1. Introduction indicates that M21-1 is a Adjudication Procedure Manual. Which is Veterans Affairs interpretation of the CFR Title 38 and USC Title 38. However, these decisions by VA interpretations get overturned regularly and therefore the law needs to be interpretated independently.
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