[2][5][6] The official version of these laws appears in the United States Statutes at Large, a chronological, uncodified compilation.

The official text of an Act of Congress is that of the "enrolled bill" (traditionally printed on parchment) presented to the President for his signature or disapproval.

Upon enactment of a law, the original bill is delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

[7] After authorization from the OFR,[8] copies are distributed as "slip laws" (as unbound, individually paginated pamphlets) by the Government Publishing Office (GPO).

[9] The OFR assembles annual volumes of the enacted laws and publishes them as the United States Statutes at Large.

It is arranged strictly in chronological order; statutes addressing related topics may be scattered across many volumes, and are not consolidated with later amendments.

[2] The United States Code is the result of an effort to make finding relevant and effective statutes simpler by reorganizing them by subject matter, and eliminating expired and amended sections.

If a dispute arises as to the accuracy or completeness of the codification of an unenacted title, the courts will turn to the language in the United States Statutes at Large.

This process makes that title of the United States Code "legal evidence"[17] of the law in force.

Where a title has been enacted into positive law, a court may neither permit nor require proof of the underlying original Acts of Congress.

[19] Early efforts at codifying the Acts of Congress were undertaken by private publishers; these were useful shortcuts for research purposes, but had no official status.

Congress undertook an official codification called the Revised Statutes of the United States approved June 22, 1874, for the laws in effect as of December 1, 1873.

According to the preface to the Code, "From 1897 to 1907 a commission was engaged in an effort to codify the great mass of accumulating legislation.

The first edition of the United States Code (published as Statutes at Large Volume 44, Part 1) includes cross-reference tables between the USC and two of these unofficial codes, United States Compiled Statutes Annotated by West Publishing Co. and Federal Statutes Annotated by Edward Thompson Co. During the 1920s, some members of Congress revived the codification project, resulting in the approval of the United States Code by Congress in 1926.

[20] The official version of the Code is published by the LRC (Office of the Law Revision Counsel) as a series of paper volumes.

[21][22] The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema of the XML was designed to be consistent with the Akoma Ntoso project (from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) XML schema,[23] and the OASIS LegalDocML technical committee standard will be based upon Akoma Ntoso.

[25] The publishers of these versions frequently issue supplements (in hard copy format as pocket parts) that contain newly enacted laws, which may not yet have appeared in an official published version of the Code, as well as updated secondary materials such as new court decisions on the subject.

The Code is divided into 53 titles (listed below), which deal with broad, logically organized areas of legislation.

Sections are often divided into (from largest to smallest) subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs, clauses, subclauses, items, and subitems.

Similarly, no particular size or length is associated with other subdivisions; a section might run several pages in print, or just a sentence or two.

[31] The underlying problem is that the original drafters of the Code in 1926 failed to foresee the explosive growth of federal legislation directed to "The Public Health and Welfare" (as Title 42 is literally titled) and did not fashion statutory classifications and section numbering schemes that could readily accommodate such expansion.

The LRC announced an "editorial reclassification" of the federal laws governing voting and elections that went into effect on September 1, 2014.

As a result, some portions of the Code consist entirely of empty chapters full of historical notes.

The Code itself does not include Executive Orders or other executive-branch documents related to the statutes, or rules promulgated by the courts.