Federal Legislative Process

Understanding how a proposed piece of legislation becomes law can be helpful when searching statutes. View the image below to see how a law is created.

• Bills are assigned numbers when introduced: H.B.# for a bill introduced in the House and S.B.# for a bill introduced in the Senate.
• Bills are numbered consecutively, starting with 1 at the beginning of each Congress. When searching for the text of House bills or Senate bills, you must know the session of Congress it was introduced.
• Only a small number of bills become law. When a bill has been signed into law, it is assigned a P.L. number (Public Law). These are also numbered consecutively and are compiled into Session Laws. 
• At the end of each Congress, the Session Laws are sent to the Office of the Law Revision Counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives, where they are codified and published in the U.S. Code and United States official statutes.
• A code is a subject arrangement of the current laws in a jurisdiction.
• There are two "unofficial" annotated versions of the U.S. Code: U.S. Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.) published by West/Thomson Reuters, and U.S. Code Service (U.S.C.S.) published by Lexis.

When searching for statutes, you will likely search a Code for a specific jurisdiction. A code is a subject arrangement of the law for a specific jurisdiction. Note that a recently passed legislation (a Public Law) will be broken up when codified and placed into a subject arrangement. Notations at the end of a section of the Code will indicate where various parts of the law originated.

State legislative structures often follow the Federal Congressional system. Names for the Legislative bodies may vary. Visit the official state website to understand the state's legislative structure better. 

Reading a Code Citation

A jurisdiction's statutes are codified -- placed in a subject arrangement -- annually. Each broad legal topic is assigned a Title. Statues are then arranged in sections within that title. A citation for a statute is composed of the title number, the abbreviation for the jurisdiction's Code, a section symbol and number for the section cited, and the year of the edition of the code being cited.

Finding Statutes in a Keyword Search

• Log into Fastcase using the link above. 
• Click on the Jurisdiction down arrow.

• Check the Federal box if you are looking for Federal statutes OR check the box for the state of interest. And click Save.

• Type keywords that describe your legal issue in the search textbox and click search.

• Review the results. Click on the title of the statute of interest to view full text.