The individual statutes for congresses 68 through 81 are now available on the Law Library of Congress website. This addition closes the gap for the years for which the Statutes at Large were not available on the Internet. As with the volumes for previous congresses, each of these statutes is tagged with tailored, descriptive metadata to help users search and browse by facets.
The material covers volumes 43 through 64 or years 1923-1950 and more than 11,000 individual statutes. This period of history was especially interesting. It dealt with the aftermath of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II and its repercussions.
These statutes include common subjects of legislation such as building bridges, supervising the Panama Canal Zone, appropriating funds, regulating banks and financial institutions, preserving water resources, assigning Native American land, creating laws for Washington, D.C., and revising the Internal Revenue Code. In addition, I found this selection of statutes interesting:
- Congress 68, Session 2, Chapter 234: Appropriates funds to pay the Swedish government for the loss of their fishing boat, Lilly, after an encounter with the Army transport, Antigone
- Congress 71, Session 2, Chapter 339: Establishes two federal penitentiaries for male prisoners, one in the Northeast U.S. and the other West of the Mississippi River
- Congress 74, Session 1, Chapter 283: Establishes the Big Bend National Park in Texas
- Congress 77, Session 1, Chapter 644: Establishes a military code and Alaska National Guard for the territory of Alaska
- Congress 80, Session 1, Chapter 270: Appropriates funds to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the seat of government in Washington, D.C.
The completion of these statutes was made possible through collaboration with the Open Law Library and several interns including Su M., Sara Hoover, Brittany M., and Chris S. We are grateful for their contributions which helped the Law Library further its goal of offering free, public access to historic U.S. legal materials.
Previous blog posts about federal statutes: