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Overview | Content | Executive Branch Documents | Digital U.S. Bills and Resolutions | Basic Subscription | Congressional Historical Indexes | Statutes at Large | Features | Why Congressional?

(ProQuest Congressional optional add-on module)

U.S. Statutes at Large is a chronological compilation of federal laws, joint and concurrent resolutions, presidential proclamations, reorganization plans, and constitutional amendments. Prior to 1950, it also included treaties and executive agreements, which have the same legal force as statutory law.

Features:

• Search all public laws and treaties or limit search to public laws, treaties with Indian tribes (1778-1874), or treaties with foreign nations (1776-1949)
• Restrict by date
• Search by keyword, Statutes at Large citation, or public law or resolution number
• Popular name look-up tool with paste-to-search capability
• Search title, popular name and synopsis of laws and treaties to retrieve full text in Adobe PDF format
• Longer laws are broken into smaller chunks for ease of use (each PDF represents a maximum of 25 pages)

By law, the Archivist of the U.S. is directed to publish the Statutes for each session of Congress: "The United States Statutes at Large shall be legal evidence of laws, concurrent resolutions, treaties, proclamations by the President, and proposed or ratified amendments to the Constitution of the United States therein contained, in all the courts of the United States, the several States, and the Territories and insular possessions of the United States." (1 U.S.C. 112; ch. 388, Public Law 278, 61 Stat. 636).

A year or so after the conclusion of each session of Congress, the slip laws are republished in collected form as a new volume of the United States Statutes at Large. Since corrections and other edits may be made to the slip law versions before the laws are republished in the bound editions of the Statutes, U.S. Statutes at Large contains the authoritative version of the legal text. For this reason, it provides an important resource for attorneys; law students and professors; and researchers interested in history, government, political science, or any aspect of public policy.

The ProQuest Congressional on-line version of U.S. Statutes at Large is updated on a monthly basis.