Strause et al.: How Federal Statutes Are Named, and the Yale Database of Federal Statute Names

Renata E.B. Strause of Yale Law School, and colleagues, have published How Federal Statutes Are Named, Law Library Journal, 105, 7-30 (2013).

Here is a summary of the article:

The naming of [U.S.] federal statutes for individuals has received surprisingly little systematic attention. The purposes of this article are to trace the history of federal statutory naming conventions and to identify as authoritatively and as completely as possible the persons and political issues Congress has decided to honor or highlight in this fashion, as well as the proliferation of abbreviations as a further shortening of the short title.

In their research the authors used the Yale Law School Library’s Database of Federal Statute Names.

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library told us that, according to Strause et al. (2013), page 12, a key source of data for the Database of Federal Statute Names was the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel’s Table of Popular Names (HT also Thom Neale of the Sunlight Foundation).

Other sources of popular name data for U.S. federal statutes include:

• The Legal Information Institute’s Table of Popular Names, developed by LII Director Tom Bruce
• the united states GitHub repository’s Bill Nicknames database, created by Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation
• THOMAS’s List of Bill Popular and Short Titles (HT Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation)
• Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska and Adrian White‘s Concordance of Federal Legislation (HT Richard Leiter)

Stephane Cottin of Secrétariat général du Gouvernement and ADIJ tells us that Legifrance publishes a similar list of popular names for French statutes, the Lois Dites….

The Yale Database of Federal Statute Names includes the following fields:

• Popular Name Statutized?:
• Type:
• Date Enacted:
• Short Title:
• Public Law citation:
• Statute At Large citation:
• Named For?:
• Link/Source:
• Notes:

According to Jason, the library does not currently provide an API or bulk access to the database, but is considering providing them in the future.

HT @maricheney and @jeiseman here and here, and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network

Tags: Allyson R. Bennett, Caitlin B. Tully, Database of Federal Statute Names, Eric Mill, Eugene R. Fidell, Jason Eiseman, Law Library Journal, Legal descriptive metadata, Legal Informatics Research Network, Legal Information Institute, Legal metadata, Legislative information systems, Legislative metadata, M. Douglass Bellis, Names of statutes, Popular names of bills, Popular names of legislation, Popular names of statutes, Renata E. B. Strause, Renata Strause, Table of Popular Names, Tom Bruce, U.S. Code, United States Code, Yale Law School Library