C. The United States Code
10. The USC divides all of the statutory law in force into 50 subject areas, or "titles". These titles are further divided into logical arrangements of the law under the subject. Since federal law is so voluminous, an arrangement of this sort is indispensable. The standard citation to the USC involves first the title number, secondly stating it is the USC, and then listing the section number. It should also include the date of publication of that volume of the USC, and the date of any later modification. An example might read "26 USC 2331 (1994)". The government’s website with the USC is both awkward and slow to update its material, so other alternatives may prove more useful. Websites with the text of the USC besides the Government's own site include Findlaw.Com, and the Legal Information Institute.
11. It is this subject arrangement of the federal statutes which is the basic tool for the practicing lawyer. The federal editing and printing process is fairly slow and is simply a presentation of the statutes. Over the years, two privately published paper versions have developed, the United States Code Annotated (USCA), and the United States Code Service (USCS). Both of these reprint the USC with a lot of additional information, the most important of which are the "case annotations". These are short summaries of the holding of court decisions which interpret particular sections of the statutes. Since roughly 1985, these have become direct quotations from the text of the case. The inclusion of such supplementary as these annotations means that the 50 titles of the USC end up as roughly 200 volumes.
12. Other information provided by these annotated versions of the USC are references to the original statute in its Statutes-at-Large version; an historical note detailing the changes in that section over the years, references to related or ancillary statutes, and references to any regulations implementing that section of the USC. The publishers also provide references to useful material in practical tools which they publish, such as the appropriate section in their form books, trial guides, treatises, and other secondary material. In the volumes which have been published over the last few years the publishers have also been providing guides on to how to search the legal databases to bring the information in the text and annotations up-to-date.
13. The material in the hard bound volumes of the USCA and the USCS are also kept up-to-date in two ways: pocket parts and interim supplements. Pocket parts are pamphlets which are issued once a year and which can be tucked into a special pocket in the binding at the rear of the book. The pocket parts follow the order of the sections in the original volume but cumulatively incorporate any textual amendments to the USC and any new annotations. The interim supplements do the same thing for the whole set for the period between the publication of one year's pocket parts and the next.
14. Both publishers provide a sophisticated word index to the whole text of the USC, published as a new set of paperbacks each year. The index volumes also include a table which shows where each section of the Statutes-at-Large has been incorporated into the USC. There is also a table known as the "Popular Name Table" which tells the reader where a law which is only known to the reader through a name, such as the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, has been incorporated into the USC, and its source in the Statutes-at-large.
