The Office of the Law Revision Counsel recently announced the addition of
Title 52 (Voting and Elections) to the official
United States Code (U.S.C.). This "editorial reclassification" takes effect on September 1 for the
electronic version of U.S.C., and will relocate voting and election-related laws from existing titles 2 and 42 into the new Title 52. (A
chart of the planned changes is already available.) Title 52 will appear in the printed
U.S. Code beginning with Supplement II of the 2012 edition.
Five years ago, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel recommended that Congress enact a
proposed new title 52 into
positive law, but federal lawmakers took no action. An
"editorial reclassification" is considered a routine transfer of existing
Code sections, and may be undertaken by the Code editors unilaterally.
The last new addition to the
Code was Title 51, National and Commercial Space Programs, which was enacted into positive law in 2010 (see
our blog post). Law Revision Counsel editors have proposed additional new titles of the
Code as
potential candidates for positive law codification:
- Title 53, Small Business
- Title 54, National Park System
- Title 55, Environment
Only time will tell if these other proposed new titles will also be added as non-positive law "editorial reclassifications" if no action is taken to enact them into positive law. For help with using the
U.S. Code in all its formats, be sure to
Ask a Librarian.