Talk:United States Code

Objectivity

The section titled "Parts of Interest" is not organized in the manner of a Wikipedia article. Furthermore, the recently added text in that section labelled "How Can a Non-Law Become Law Anyway?" should be reworded to make it less like an item from a newspaper editorial/opinion section and more like a proper encyclopedia article. Instead of using phrases like "we peons" and "so-called justice" in the last paragraph, it would be preferable to cite examples of this controversy in court cases, newspapers, TV or radio media, or other forms of public discourse. Otherwise, the text appears to be the personal opinion and judgement of an anonymous author. (17:50 GMT, 7 January 2005) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.159.248.44 (talk)

I concur, I've reverted it out, here's why

Okay, I got rid of that POV mess that was inserted by some anonymous bozo.

Here's why:

1. Overwhelmingly biased and POV
2. Included too much irrelevant junk that should go into the Law of the United States article, if it deserves to be in Wikipedia at all. An article titled "United States Code" should be about the U.S.C., not the entire system of federal statutory and regulatory law.

I suspect the text was inserted not by an attorney, but by some ordinary layperson who has gotten dragged into the legal system through some dispute and has only a weak understanding of how federal law works.

--Coolcaesar 01:43, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"some ordinary layperson". do they dip you guild boys in some sort of magical arrogance potion when they hand you your license to ill? it's a disease, apparently. SaltyPig 16:56, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Wiki Code ?

It certainly would be a large effort, but would it be appropriate to try to place the United States Code into the Wikipedia? Wikipedia would likely be able to keep the United States Code up to date more than the LRC can once it was in place. On the other hand, between the LRC site and Thomas its not too difficult to make certain one has the current law and including the US Code would likely consume at least a gigabyte of storage? 21:01, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.247.175.17 (talk) 21:01, 10 April 2005 (UTC)

That doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The U.S.C. is not only huge, it's incredibly boring. Many important sections are difficult to comprehend unless one is looking at an annotated version (for example, see the deceptively short 9 U.S.C. § 2) because of the way that the courts have fumbled around with how to interpret them and created all kinds of "judicial glosses" on their meaning. And the vast majority of U.S.C. sections are so arcane that they might be worth reading maybe once in a century; the rest of the time they'll just be occupying disk space with no one accessing them. I think Wikipedia should leave the business of messing around with the details of the U.S.C. to the LRC and the professional law publishers. --Coolcaesar 07:18, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Maybe something in between. Wikipedia doesn't seem like the right place for the code itself (if it goes anywhere, it would probably be Wikisource) but there certainly could be a lot more room for explanation of specific portions of the law. Perhaps we could split each code onto each own page to facilitate this? --Arcadian 12:49, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me a better idea is to just stay with the status quo where we have articles for specific acts like the Americans with Disabilities Act and specific government departments like Homeland Security, with appropriate citations to code sections (and links to the text of specific Code sections as posted by outside sites, if they're relevant). "Federal Arbitration Act" is a lot more memorable then 9 U.S.C. § 1 et seq. --Coolcaesar 16:50, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Definitely. The USC is actually regularly published in the real world, unlike many other codifications like the California Codes (I actually don't know if they are actually printed by the government of California), making it an excellent candidate for Wikisource. While "huge" and "incredibly boring", it's also one set of books that decides life and death (like the Bible in the days of yore), as well as pretty much every other daily activity, in America now. But again, unfortunately, Wikipedia would not be a good place for it; that is for Wikisource. Int21h (talk) 20:28, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Titles need work

The titles seem to be quite out of date. I'm looking at http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/cfr-table-search.html#page1 as a comparison. It seems like the table of titles should be brought up to date with the GPO's assessment, though I'm too timid to do it all.

Brian — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.67.6.46 (talk) 23:48, 30 June 2005 (UTC)

• Brian, that link takes you to a list of titles in the Code of Federal Regulations. The list of U.S. Code titles is here. Russ Blau (talk) July 1, 2005 02:26 (UTC)

Most famous by far?

"By far, the most famous section in the Code is 42 U.S.C. § 1983"

I am not a lawyer, but I do not think that this is the most famous part of the US code. I think TITLE 26 Subtitle A CHAPTER 1 Subchapter D PART I Subpart A § 401 is more famous for non-lawyers. Most people have heard of 401(k), not as many 42 U.S.C. § 1983. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.22.224.57 (talk) 16:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Your complaint sounds reasonable. Feel free to switch it to something like "One of the most famous sections..." or something like that. --Arcadian 16:23, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Sources

I notice this article has no sources. Why? What is the source of this knowledge? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.214.238.121 (talk • contribs) 06:42, June 6, 2007 (UTC)

Organic Laws

Can someone please add a section on the organic laws? They constitute the first section of USC, and (ideally) are the most important. Jive Dadson (talk) 11:21, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Abbreviations?

What do the abbreviations "# App. U.S.C. #" and "# U.S.C. App #" represent? Int21h (talk) 03:58, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Picture

Can someone replace the picture of West's USCA volumes with a picture of the official USC? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.28.18.148 (talk) 20:52, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Level of law -- proposed new text

I came to this article for one reason: to find out where it ranked in the big picture of US laws; this article did not answer my question. I did find the answer, however, at Law of the United States#Levels of law and I was going to incorporate that information into this article. But, since I am not a lawyer and do not speak the leagaleze language this article is written in, my text would seem out of place and would probably have been reverted. So I come here hoping to get the info inserted into the article by users who are involved with this article. Here is my proposed text (very rough BTW):

== Level of law ==

Main article: Law of the United States § Levels of law

The United States Code is subordinate to the United States Constitution but preempts state and local laws. Federal law that conflicts with the Constitution is invalid. State and local laws that conflict with either the Constitution or Federal law are similarly invalid. Disputes regarding such conflicts are resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I would appreciate feedback/copyediting from subject matter experts. I look forward to hearing back. Rgrds. (Dynamic IP, will change when I log off.) --64.85.215.35 (talk) 15:25, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I went ahead and added it. Rgrds. (Dynamic IP, will change when I log off.) --64.85.214.91 (talk) 05:42, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Title 26 Positive Law

We should also color code Title 26 and explain its unique status. Although Title 26 is not itself positive law (light blue), it is an exact copy of the Internal Revenue Code, which is positive law. Some colors we might use: light green, light orange, light purple. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.123.105.144 (talk) 19:16, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

"Awkward Numbering"

This section seemed a bit off to me. It seemed like the wording of the section, with words like "shoehorning", "to simply jam" and "Then Congress never gets around to...", implies a bias against Congress; basically, I feel like that wording makes it seem that Congress is inherently inefficient or cluttered in some way, which probably should not be in a Wikipedia article (feel free to correct me if this is wrong). In addition, it seems a bit nebulous, what actually is "awkward" numbering? Radioactivated (talk) 00:40, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree. That section is completely unreferenced and appears to reflect an individual editor's point of view. I suggest deleting it entirely. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 00:45, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and deleted the section. Radioactivated (talk) 16:23, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Just noticed this. With all due respect, I strongly disagree with that deletion of a section I added which has been in this article for several years.

Have you ever actually tried to read the Medicare or Medicaid statutes? Have you ever read the Internal Revenue Code? Or the Bankruptcy Code? Have you ever argued specific sections to a federal judge on behalf of a client with real money at issue? It's very worrisome when people edit articles on issues that they are not personally familiar with.

The entire point of codification as originally proposed in the United States (Lawrence Friedman and Andrew Morriss have discussed this in writing among others) was to clean up the law; to make it so easy to read and comprehend that any reasonably literate man or woman could understand by simply reading through a code, instead of paying a lawyer to paw through hundreds of volumes of case law reporters to figure out the law for them. That objective has been completely defeated when U.S.C. sections grow into 20-page monsters where the cross-references to each other differ by only one or two digits.

Try reading the Social Security Act sometime and see how long it takes for your eyes to glaze over when reading through cross-references like "section 1396a(a)(10)(E)(iv)"---and one cross-reference after another refers to "section 139X" something, since almost all the substantive provisions of the Act are between sections 1391 and 1397. --Coolcaesar (talk) 15:48, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Coolcaesar, your point of view may be entirely reasonable, and even objectively correct, but neither of those is the point. Wikipedia content must be based on reliable sources. (See, e.g., WP:Truth.) The U.S. Code is a topic on which there is no shortage of articles published in reputable scholarly journals (i.e., law reviews), so it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that any discussion of the ease or difficulty of using the Code ought to be based upon such sources, and not an editor's personal experience. (And yes, in fact, I have had personal experience arguing statutory provisions to judges.) --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:37, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Broken external links

Several of the references in the Notes section have broken external links. Some have broken internal links. Here are a few.

• 1. Title 1 of the Code as published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel [1]
• 4. United States Code [2]
• 6. Public and Private Laws: About, United States Government Printing Office, "After the President signs a bill into law, it is
• delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) …" [3]
• 7. same as No. 6
• 16. Howard, Alexander B. (July 30, 2013). "U.S. House of Representatives publishes U.S. Code as open government data". e-pluribusunum.com. Retrieved August 21, 2013. [4]
• 21. Bellis MD. (2008). Statutory Structure and Legislative Drafting Conventions: A Primer for Judges. Federal Judicial Center. [5]

Of course the WSJ articles are behind a paywall, but that's par for the course. Guess I need to make a trip to the library. Do they still have those? Rkedge (talk) 18:16, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Relevance of criminalization section?

I'm having a hard time seeing the relevance of the section « Number and growth of criminalized actions » in relation to the US Code. The only reason it appears in this article appears to be that the amount of crimes are measured through their appearance in the USC, but I personally think it would be more at home in overcriminalization. Sincerely, InsaneHacker (💬) 23:03, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Fully concur. It's not an issue that is germane to the Code as a whole. It's merely an issue of substantive criminal law. It's not any more relevant to the subject of this article, than, say, a discussion of ERISA preemption. --Coolcaesar (talk) 05:06, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Unconstitutional provisions

The article says "When sections are repealed, their text is deleted and replaced by a note summarizing what used to be there." Does this apply to laws struck down as unconstitutional in court? The Defense of Marriage Act is still encoded at 1 U.S. Code § 7 but appears not to be enforced or enforceable. Is it the habit of Congress to repeal these kind of laws after a while as an administrative tidying act, or at least omit them from the Code? If not, can the Code really be considered a reliable central document people can consult to find out the law, without cross-referencing all kinds of amending statues and court decisions? Beorhtwulf (talk) 21:31, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Poor choice of words by User:Jokestress in lead paragraphs of all articles on all USC titles

User:Jokestress created articles for all the then-extant USC titles back in 2007, but used a poor choice of words in the lead paragraph of each article that reveals a lack of understanding of how a legal code actually works.

A title of a code doesn't "outline" the law codified therein. It is simply the subdivision of a code which is home to statutes covering certain enumerated subject matter. For an actual "outline" of the law, one would resort to a outline-form secondary source like the Rutter Group legal treatises.

Any objections before I clean this mess up? --Coolcaesar (talk) 20:30, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Section on "Number and growth of federal crimes"

I would propose to delete this section entirely, since it is discussing the substance of the law, rather than the process of codification that is the topic of this article. Wanted to get other opinions before doing anything, particularly since this content could be relevant in an article on a more pertinent topic, such as Federal crime in the United States. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:21, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree that this section is entirely irrelevant to the article. 2kch (talk) 15:44, 27 October 2023 (UTC)