Monday 2 April 2012

US Code of Federal Regulations - Checking for amendments to Federal Regulations

Today I learnt how to check for amendments to a US Federal Regulation.

Believe it or not that is not an easy task for a UK law librarian like me, who is not overly familiar with the US legal system. The first step was to find out what exactly is a Federal Regulation. IALS Research Guides by Jurisdiction (United States) told me that Federal Regulations are equivalent to UK Statutory Instruments; i.e. secondary legislation.*

Federal Regulations are codified on an annual basis, and this codification takes the form of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). This is not the same as the US Code. The CFR (annual edition) is available on the US Government Printing Office (GPO) website. It is divided into 50 titles, which correspond to broad subject areas. The Code is codified every year as follows:

Titles 1-16 are revised as of 1 January
Titles 17-27 are revised as of 1 April
Titles 28-41 are revised as of 1 July
Titles 42-50 are revised as of 1 October

When you have found the most up-to-date version of the Title / Chapter you need you can view it in a PDF document which includes a list of all of the amendments that have been made to that Title to date. There may be better ways to tackle this kind of research, but it worked for me!

Access the CFR on the GPO website:

* IALS Research Guides by Jurisdiction: United States