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How to . . . find laws, acts, or statutes

You can read the full text of recent public and private laws on the Web, you can order them from the Senate or House Document Rooms, or you can find copies of laws in a library.

A law may also be referred to as an act (such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act) or as a statute. An important note to remember is that laws get amended over the years, which means that the language of a law can be changed, added to, or deleted. If you want to read a law that is currently in force--that is, the amended version of the law--you will want to look at the United States Code.

Web Access

The full text of more recent laws are on the GPO Access and THOMAS Web sites:

GPO Access provides the full text of public and private laws from the 104th Congress (1995-1996) to the current Congress.

THOMAS provides the full text of laws from the 101st Congress (1989-1990) to the current Congress. For laws from the 104th Congress (1995-1996) to the present Congress, there is a link to the GPO Access site. For laws from the 101st to the 103rd Congress (1993-1994), the law is presented in the form of the enrolled bill, which is the final version of a bill that is sent to the president for his signature. THOMAS also contains summaries of public laws from the 93rd Congress (1973-1974) to the 100th Congress (1987-1988).

Document Rooms

The Senate and House Document Rooms may be able to provide you with a copy of a slip law. Check with them for availability.

Libraries

At the end of each session of Congress, public laws are published in annual volumes called the United States Statutes at Large, which are published by the Government Printing Office. A more timely resource for finding the text of laws as originally passed by Congress is U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News (U.S.C.C.A.N.), which is a commercial publication. Like the Statutes at Large, U.S.C.C.A.N. may be available at large public libraries or federal depository libraries.

You can find your public library by looking it up in the phone book; libraries are often listed in the local government section of the blue pages or they may be listed in the yellow pages under "libraries." Or you can look at a list of libraries that have Web sites or a list of state libraries.

Public laws are generally available in a federal depository library. The federal depository library system is made up of over 1,300 libraries that collect government documents and make them available to the public for borrowing or reading. A list of depository libraries is available on GPO's Web site. Most depository libraries are within a university or state library, so sometimes borrowing privileges are restricted.


	For information on the Senate, Congress, the legislative process and the federal government, the Virtual Reference Desk is a good place to begin.


	Follow this guide on how to contact your Senators by phone, postal mail, or on the Web.


	Historical information provided by the Senate Historical Office.


	Compilations of Law links to the full text of several popular acts of law as they have been amended over the years.