Legisworks Historical Statutes at Large Data

The Legisworks Statutes at Large Project consists of metadata and per-statute PDF files for 32,181 enties in the U.S. Statutes at Large through volume 64, which contains all ~28,000 laws enacted by the United States Congress through 1951.

What's Here

The following table gives an overview of the data in this repository. As the table shows, this repository contains information on the first 64 volumes of the Statutes at Large (1st Congress through 81st Congress, 1789-January 1951). The Pages column gives the total of the page counts of the items for which there is metadata (which may be more than the total page count of the volume because entries can share a page).

The final six columns gives the total number of entries in each volume by type (for the most frequent types). You can see that between the 31st and 32nd volumes, the numbering of laws switched over from the old Chapter format to the new Public Law format.

Volume	Congress	Pages	Pub. Law	Chapter	Pub. Res.	Joint Res.	Pres. Proc.	Treaty
1	1-5	1,247	0	459	0	28	0	0
2	6-12	1,542	0	691	0	22	0	0
3	13-17	1,573	0	703	0	62	9	0
4	18-23	1,730	0	849	0	50	9	0
5	24-28	1,496	0	611	0	81	2	0
6	1-28	1,039	0	0	0	0	0	0
7	n/a	846	0	0	0	0	0	242
8	n/a	708	0	0	0	0	0	88
9	29-31	1,199	0	347	0	80	11	0
10	32-33	1,054	0	274	0	51	3	0
11	34-35	1,308	0	228	0	59	52	30
12	36-37	2,080	0	464	119	0	19	47
13	38	1,100	0	319	0	93	52	0
14	39	1,022	0	306	122	0	9	0
15	40	793	0	226	128	0	15	0
16	41	1,110	0	306	156	0	17	0
17	42	1,189	0	515	16	0	15	0
18	43	1,734	0	387	0	23	12	25
19	44	954	0	249	27	0	10	0
20	45	823	0	254	49	0	8	0
21	46	902	0	285	84	0	6	0
22	47	1,073	0	332	89	0	5	0
23	48	822	0	212	65	0	14	0
24	49	1,602	0	338	57	0	10	0
25	50	1,605	0	506	62	0	8	0
26	51	1,772	0	530	80	0	18	0
27	52	1,298	0	347	0	51	50	0
28	53	2,838	0	374	0	89	17	0
29	54	1,395	0	355	0	78	31	0
30	55	1,960	0	449	0	103	26	0
31	56	1,929	0	382	0	60	21	0
32	57	1,710	423	0	57	0	0	0
33	58	1,858	502	0	73	0	0	0
34	59	2,201	692	0	83	0	0	0
35	60	1,579	350	0	61	0	0	0
36	61	2,055	526	0	69	0	0	0
37	62	2,125	457	0	73	0	0	0
38	63	1,643	342	0	75	0	0	0
39	64	1,660	400	0	58	0	0	0
40	65	1,757	349	0	56	0	0	0
41	66	1,917	401	0	69	0	0	0
42	67	2,215	549	0	105	0	0	0
43	68	2,065	632	0	75	0	0	0
44	69	2,335	808	0	71	0	0	0
45	70	2,845	1,037	0	108	0	0	0
46	71	2,636	869	0	140	0	0	0
47	72	2,138	442	0	74	0	0	0
48	73	1,830	486	0	53	0	0	0
49	74	3,027	851	0	136	0	0	0
50	75	1,405	415	0	74	0	0	0
51	75	446	2	0	3	0	18	0
52	75	1,681	372	0	53	0	0	0
53	76	1,384	400	0	52	0	0	0
54	76	1,815	494	0	59	0	0	0
55	77	1,274	397	0	0	0	0	0
56	77	1,543	453	0	0	0	0	0
57	78	860	219	0	0	0	0	0
58	78	1,262	349	0	0	0	0	0
59	79	981	294	0	0	0	0	0
60	79	1,527	440	0	0	0	0	0
61	80	1,340	395	0	0	0	0	0
62	80	1,829	511	0	0	0	0	0
63	81	1,509	440	0	0	0	0	0
64	81	1,724	481	0	0	0	0	0

History

The Legisworks Statutes at Large Project (http://legisworks.org/sal/) was a project led by Joe Carmel in July 2014 to create permalinks at http://legislink.org/us to PDFs for each United States statute enacted through 1951 (Statutes at Large volume 64). At the time (and still now), there was no authoritative digital source for these statues (although several unofficial sources existed) and no permalinks to indiviual statutes. In addition, the project created a cross-walk between volume-and-page Statutes at Large citations to public law numbers and related citation formats. (For statues since 1951 / volume 65, see https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/STATUTE.)

The PDFs were originally sourced from Constitution.org, who had digitized and OCRd the physical volumes. Volunteers typed up the per-statute page numbers, topic, and title, and split the PDFs into per-statute files. (The volunteers were Daniel Schuman, Joseph Jerome, Sara S. Frug, Owen Ambur, Matthew Steinberg, Eric Branson, Kathy K. Carmichael, Susannah Savage, Azhar Unwala, and Daniel Bennett.) In 2019, Joe asked Joshua Tauberer to take over the project --- Joshua converted the information to the YAML metadata files in this repository.

In August-October 2014, the USPL, USStat, and USStatute Wikipedia templates were updated to link to legislink.org for statutes. In 2019, Joshua took over legislink.org and merged it into his project uslaw.link, a resolver for U.S. law legal citations, preserving the URLs to statutes used by the Wikipedia templates (see https://github.com/unitedstates/uslaw.link).

Metadata

The data directory contains a YAML-formatted file for each volume of the U.S. Statutes at Large 001.yaml through 064.yaml. Each file is an array describing the entries in the volume. An entry can be a law, a resolution, and collection of laws for a session, and so on.

The data in this repository is messy. The Statutes at Large itself is messy (there are law numbers with "½" symbols!), the original PDFs were missing some pages, the scans and OCR which may have been used to extract text metadata were imperfect, the metadata was often typed by hand, etc.

Entries begin with the following fields:

- volume: 1
  page: 755
  npages: 2
  file: STATUTE-1-Pg755.pdf

The first three fields are the Statutes at Large volume number that the item appears in, the page number of the first page the item appears on, and the number of pages the item appears on. The first two fields are commonly used for x Stat. y citations. When there are items that are less than one page long, multiple items can start on the same page, and so x Stat. y citations can be ambiguous.

The file field indicates where the file lives --- documented below.

Many entries also have a topic and title, which are metadata that appears in and was typed up from the actual Statutes at Large.

  topic: District of Columbia, abandonment of W street
  title: AN ACT to authorize the abandonment of W street northeast, Washington, District
    of Columbia. April 12, 1904 174

Most entries will additionally have fields drawn from those in the following example:

  congress: 58
  session: 2
  type: publaw
  number: 108
  citation: Pub. Law 58-108

There was no consistent numbering of laws or other entries throughout the full history of the Statutes at Large. Consequently, all fields are optional.

congress and session refer to the Congress number and session in which the law was enacted or to which item pertains. Both are integers. session is 1, 2, or 3.

type can be one of:

• publaw (Pub. Law; Public Law), volumes 32-64
• chap (Chapter, the early numbering method for laws), volumes 1-31
• private-chap (Priv. Chapter), volume 18 only
• jointres (Joint Res.; Joint Resolutions), volumes 1-31 (after which these are numbered as public laws)
• pubres (Pub. Res.; Public Resolution)
• proc (Pres. Proc.; Presidential Proclamation)
• treaty (Treaty)
• tsnum (T. S.; another treaty designation)
• eas (E. A. S.; an international agreement)
• exec-order (Exec. Order; Executive Order)
• hjres and sjres (House and Senate Joint Resolutions, perhaps only in cases of constitutional amendments)

and several lesser used values.

(Public laws refers to laws that are generally applicable, while private laws refers to laws that affected a small number of individualls, usually by name, and often related to immigration matters.)

number is the law number or other number associated with the item. The value is an integer in almost all cases, but in eight cases the Statutes at Large contains an entry with an odd number:

Volume	Page	Entry	Number
36	352	Pub. Law 61-167½	'167½'
40	1053	Pub. Law 65-246½	'246½'
42	147	Pub. Law 67-45-46	'45-46'
44	777	Pub. Law 69-439½	'439½'
49	674	Pub. Law 74-297½	'297½'
49	1894	Pub. Law 74-770½	'770½'
51	295	E. A. S. 75-107A	'107-A'
59	502	Pub. Law 79-160-A	'160-A'

The congress, session, type, and number taken together can unqiuely identify virtually all entries in the dataset. (Where it doesn't, it may be a data entry error.) Prior to volume 38 (the 60th Congress), the numbering of entries restarted with each session, but starting with that volume, congress, type, and number are sufficient to uniquely identify virtually all entries (with the handful remaining being possible data errors).

citation contains a display form of a citation to the item. The citation may be ambiguous, however, since the citation format may only contain information about the type and number or congress, type, and number, depending on the volume.

A small number of entries also have a chapter field, during a period in which entries were assigned sequential numbers both by type and in the obsoleted chapter format.

Additionally, some special items have an id field, as in:

- volume: 1
  page: 1
  npages: 5
  id: DECLARATION
  topic: ~
  title: The Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776)
  file: STATUTE-1-Pg1.pdf

PDF Files

The file field on each entry indicates where a PDF file lives that holds just the pages of the entry.

To acess the PDF, form a URL by substituting the volume and file fields into

https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/{volume}/{file}

For instance https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/46/STATUTE-46-Pg822a.pdf holds Pub. Law 71-457.

Missing Pages

Some pages were missing from the source scans, and as a result the PDF files may be missing pages.

• Volume 47 is missing page 1622 at the end of the volume. Available at wikisource.org.
• Volume 50 is missing page 319. Not available at wikisource.org.
• Volume 51 is missing pages 6, 7, 12, 277, 302, and 370.
• Volume 55 is missing pages 690 and 691.
• Volume 56 is missing pages 803 and 804.
• Volume 58 is missing pages 28-30, 187, and 247-252.
• Volume 60 is missing page 252.
• Volume 62 is missing pages 130-135, 866, 867, and 992-1009. Page 1009 is the start of Public Law 774.
• Volume 63 is missing pages 806, 813, 965, 966, and 1045-1049.
• Volume 64 is missing pages 913, 922-926.