The Roo's Research Toolkit

As you begin your legal education, you may have noticed that your textbooks are filled with cases. Of course, case law is not the only type of law. In this portion of the Research Toolkit, we will discuss statutes—written enactments by our legislative bodies like Congress or your state legislature. Statutes are essentially the building blocks of our legal system, outlining what is expected or prohibited by law.

Below is a helpful flowchart that outlines the publication process of statutes:

Beau Steenken & Tina M. Brooks, Sources of American Law 41 (7th ed. 2023).

Now, let's take each of these steps in turn:

1. Odds are you are familiar with Schoolhouse Rock's I'm Just a Bill song. A legislator must propose a law as a bill, which then goes through many committee processes before being voted on by both chambers and signed by the executive. This law (or Act) is first published as a Slip Law. At the federal level, the Act will be assigned a Public Law Number. Take a look at the following screenshot of a public law:

2. At the end of each legislative session, all of the Acts enacted during the session will be published chronologically as Session Laws. The federal publication for these session laws is the United States Statutes at Large.

PAUSE: Take a look at the screenshot below, which identifies the important citation components that inform you about the Act:

3. These new laws then go through the process of Codification. The code will be updated to reflect any new laws, amendments, or repeals that are the result of the new laws. Codes are organized topically; statutes about similar topics will appear in the same general area of the code. As an example, let's take a closer look at the Act discussed above. Throughout the Act, specific sections will be assigned to areas of the code in which these sections will be codified. This is designated as follows:

Now let's use this code section to identify the important pieces of a statute in the section below.

Let's dissect the pieces of a statute using the example below:

First things first, let's understand the citation to this statute: 15 U.S.C.S. § 657i. What do these letters and numbers mean?

• 15 is the Title. Codes are organized topically. Take a quick look at the U.S.C.'s table of contents here. Title 15 in the U.S.C. is Commerce and Trade. This means that all statutes in Title 15 will relate to the topic of Commerce and Trade, as opposed to Title 29, which focuses on Labor.
• U.S.C.S. stands for United States Code Service. This is the unofficial code published by Lexis. The official code is just called the United States Code. Westlaw's version is called the U.S.C.A., which is the abbreviation for United States Code Annotated. All of these codes contain the actual written law, but the unofficial versions have the added value of annotations. Annotations are added after the text of the statute and contain references to cases that interpret the statute.
• § 657i is the code section, which is the isolated statute we are viewing. In general, you will be citing specific code sections when asked to locate a relevant statute. Each code section will have an assigned name. Here, the code section is named "Coordination of disaster assistance programs with FEMA". The section name should describe the content of the section.

Currency: The phrase "current through Public Law 118-70" means that this code section is current through the 70th law enacted during the 118th Congress. There is an added date component, "approved July 12, 2024", which further indicates how up-to-date this code section is.

Section Text: Following the section number/name is the actual text of the statute. When researching statutes, you want to locate a code section that requires, prohibits, or permits conduct. You can determine whether a section accomplishes this by searching for "red flag language." Red flag language consists of words like shall/must (requires), shall not/must not (prohibits), and may (permits). Some statutes will not have red flag language, such as definitions or purpose sections.

Amendment History: At the end of the statutory text, you will find the credits (or history) for the section. This line provides the citation for the enacting law (the first entry), followed by the citations to any amending laws (in chronological order). Take a close look at the history line for this code section. Do you see anything familiar? (Hint: One of the Public Law citations should ring a bell!)

Passcode: eFH=89rT