List of United States federal legislation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a partial list of notable United States federal legislation, in chronological order. At the federal level in the United States, legislation (a.k.a. "statutes" or "statutory law") consists exclusively of Acts passed by the Congress of the United States (and its predecessor, the Continental Congress), that were either signed into law by the President or subsequently passed by Congress after a presidential veto.

Each biennial Congress enacts approximately 200-300 statutes. After 109 Congresses, more than 20,000 statutes have been enacted since 1789. This list contains, therefore, only a small selection. Most of the statutes listed here have already merited an article in this encyclopedia.

Contents:
Publication of the law
Statutes at Large
Sessions and Chapters
Public Laws
United States Code
Examples


Continental Congress
Years: Congress number
1789-1801: 1 2 3 4 5 6
1801-1811: 7 8 9 10 11
1811-1821: 12 13 14 15 16
1821-1831: 17 18 19 20 21
1831-1841: 22 23 24 25 26
1841-1851: 27 28 29 30 31
1851-1861: 32 33 34 35 36
1861-1871: 37 38 39 40 41
1871-1881: 42 43 44 45 46
1881-1891: 47 48 49 50 51
1891-1901: 52 53 54 55 56
1901-1911: 57 58 59 60 61
1911-1921: 62 63 64 65 66
1921-1931: 67 68 69 70 71
1931-1941: 72 73 74 75 76
1941-1951: 77 78 79 80 81
1951-1961: 82 83 84 85 86
1961-1971: 87 88 89 90 91
1971-1981: 92 93 94 95 96
1981-1991: 97 98 99 100 101
1991-2001: 102 103 104 105 106
2001-present: 107 108 109 110
See also
Sources

Legislation is not the only source of regulations with force of law. However, most executive branch regulations must originate in a congressional grant of power. See also: Executive orders of the President; regulations of Executive branch departments and administrative agencies; and the procedural rules of the federal courts.

Acts of Congress are published in the United States Statutes at Large. Volumes 1 through 18, which have all the statutes passed from 1789 to 1875, are available on-line at the Library of Congress, here. In the list below, some statutes are listed by chapter and X Stat. Y. With the beginning of each new Congress, the chapter is the order in which the statute was enacted during that Congress. See example below.

Each Congress has two or three sessions. In each session, the Acts are numbered sequentially as "Chapter."

Today, Acts of Congress are designated in the form: Public Law X-Y where X is the number of the ordinal Congress and Y is the number of the chronological order of the Act in that Congress. See example below.

General and permanent laws of the United States are codified into the United States Code (abbreviated here and commonly elsewhere as "U.S.C."), where they are ordered by topic rather than chronology. Where known, an external link is provided in the list below to the U.S. Code section (via the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University).


Template:USCongress

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