A statute slip is the first publication of a federal statute, duplicated by the Archivist of the United States. Slip laws are compiled into the United States Code and published annually as United States Statutes at Large. They are relied upon as official proof of laws enacted by the government. The United States Code is organized by topic, while the United States Statutes at Large is organized chronologically.
A statute slip is the first original publication of a federal statute. Created by the Archivist of the United States, they are the first duplicates made of the original document, signed by the president. Slip laws are compiled into the United States Code and were made for every general and permanent law signed into United States law. They are assembled annually by the Archivist of the United States and published as United States Statutes at Large.
The official texts of laws passed by Congress are called “enrolled bills” and are printed on parchment and signed by the president. Once issued, they are archived and duplicated by the Archivist. A copy of this is known as the slip law, or unbound law, and is issued in unbound pamphlets by the Government Printing Office. The slip law bears a heading denoting the public or private law number, bill number, date of approval, and a citation in the United States Statutes generally.
The slip law is complemented by marginal and editorial notes from the Office of the Federal Register’s National Archives and Records Administration. These notes explain the details of the law and provide a number of important details, including: the classification of the United States code, the history of the law, the committee report number, the names of the committees in each house, the date of the examination and passage in each house and a reference to the minutes of the Congress by volume and date.
Under the law of Section 113 of Title 1 of the United States Code, a law of slip is a legal and competent evidence of the laws enacted in the United States. Where it would be impractical to make the original copy of the parchment laws available to all courts, lawyers and judges across the country, a slip law is relied upon as official proof of laws enacted by the government. They contain all the details of the law as written and are codified in two different sources.
The United States Code, published every six years by the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives, contains every slip of law and is organized by topic under 50 easily searchable topics. The United States Statutes at Large, by contrast, is published each year with each piece of law in chronological order and, due to a lack of topical organization, is not as convenient as the United States Code. A related statute or slip law passed in a different year may be filed nowhere near another slip law, and thus would require cross-referencing and a knowledge of the history of the laws.
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