The Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the

United States House of Representatives The United States House of Representatives is a chamber of the Bicameralism, bicameral United States Congress; it is the lower house, with the U.S. Senate being the upper house. Together, the House and Senate have the authority under Artic ...

prepares and publishes the

United States Code The United States Code (formally The Code of Laws of the United States of America) is the official Codification (law), codification of the general and permanent Law of the United States#Federal law, federal statutes of the United States. It ...

, which is a consolidation and codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. The Office was created in 1974 when the provisions of Title II, sec. 205, of ,

93rd United States Congress The 93rd United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D.C., from January 3, 197 ...

, were enacted by , .

Appointment and duties

The counsel is appointed by the Speaker of the House and must

prepare, and submit to the Committee on the Judiciary one title at a time, a complete compilation, restatement, and revision of the general and permanent laws of the United States which conforms to the understood policy, intent, and purpose of the Congress in the original enactments, with such amendments and corrections as will remove ambiguities, contradictions, and other imperfections both of substance and of form, separately stated, with a view to the enactment of each title as
positive law Positive laws () are human-made laws that oblige or specify an action. Positive law also describes the establishment of specific rights for an individual or group. Etymologically, the name derives from the verb ''to posit''. The concept of posit ...
."

The counsel takes each

Act of Congress An act of Congress is a statute enacted by the United States Congress. Acts may apply only to individual entities (called Public and private bills, private laws), or to the general public (Public and private bills, public laws). For a Bill (law) ...

that covers more than one subject and makes the revisions indicated to each title of the

. The counsel also regularly reviews the United States Code and proposes new titles to be enacted as positive law (meaning that they would displace all prior statutes on the same subject and become the law itself). Some proposed titles are simply updates of U.S.C. titles that were previously codified as ''

prima facie ''Prima facie'' (; ) is a Latin expression meaning "at first sight", or "based on first impression". The literal translation would be "at first face" or "at first appearance", from the feminine forms of ' ("first") and ' ("face"), both in the a ...

'' evidence of the statutory law but have not yet been enacted as positive law.1 USC 204(a) Other proposed titles collect the substance of all existing statutes on a particular subject from across the U.S.C. and the Statutes at Large into a new title. The current counsel, Ralph V. Seep, was appointed by Speaker

John Boehner John Andrew Boehner ( ; born , 1949) is an American politician who served as the 53rd speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he served 13 terms as the U.S. representative ...

, effective June 2, 2011.

References

External links

* Law Revision Counsel 1974 establishments in Washington, D.C. {{US-law-stub