LOCATING AND UPDATING FEDERAL ADMINISTRATIVE MATERIALS

Administrative rules and regulations, both federal and state, carry the force of law. They are promulgated under authority granted by statute to expand upon the general outline provided by the statute and to prescribe or prohibit activities in areas statutes do not reach. The federal compilation of administrative regulations currently in force is the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.). The chronological compilation of new and amended regulations, both proposed and final, is the Federal Register (F.R.)

Researching in print format

The C.F.R. is published in paper-bound volumes that are re-issued annually. It is organized into titles that roughly correspond to the titles used to organize the United States Code. For example, Title 26 of the U.S.C. is the Internal Revenue Code, while Title 26 of C.F.R. contains Internal Revenue Service regulations. However, the correlation is not so precise for all titles. For example, Title 17 of the U.S.C. contains copyright statutes, while Title 17 of the C.F.R. contains securities regulations. The annual updating of the C.F.R. is done sequentially, with a portion of the entire set updated each quarter. Check the front of each volume to determine when it was last updated.

The Federal Register is published every Monday through Friday except on federal holidays. It contains, among other items, the text of new and amended regulations, as well as proposed new regulations and amendments, and notices of repealed regulations.

Locating federal regulations by topic

• Use the official subject index published in the last volume of the C.F.R., or the unofficial subject index published as part of the United States Code Service.

• If you know the citation to the enabling or other relevant statute, you may be able to locate a cross-reference to the pertinent regulations. Currently the United States Code Service (U.S.C.S.) contains more cross-references to the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) than United States Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.). Look up the federal statute and scan the accompanying annotations. Often a C.F.R. reference will appear after the statutory language and before the case annotations begin.

• Even though the Code annotations may include a reference(s) to C.F.R., it may not be precisely on point. It may direct you to a general title and "part" - or subdivision - of C.F.R. without giving you a subject description or subsection. Another way to find the C.F.R. section you want is to locate the most current "CFR Index and Finding Aids" volume, either the official version published as part of the C.F.R. or the version that is part of U.S.C.S. This volume can be used in two ways:
  1. Look for the pertinent regulation through a keyword search in the subject matter index
  2. Use “Table I - Parallel Table of Authorities and Rules” that provides cross-references from the U.S. Code sections to their corresponding C.F.R. sections.

Updating regulations

• Because agency regulations are newly promulgated, or revised or repealed, on a constant basis, the paper C.F.R. volumes that are issued yearly are out of date literally by the time they reach the library shelves. Therefore it is necessary to determine whether a particular regulation has been affected by recent agency action. The C.F.R. is updated by the Federal Register. There is an updating tool called the List of Sections Affected (LSA) that enables you to track developments affecting a regulation through the Federal Register.

To update a C.F.R. section:

1. Note the date your C.F.R. volume's coverage stops by looking at the title page of the volume.
2. Collect the LSA pamphlet(s) necessary to update the C.F.R. section you located.
3. Look up the regulation. There are two separate listings under each title: one for final rules and one for proposed rules. You should check them both.

If your section is not listed, there have been no changes during the period covered. If your section is listed, you will see a one or two word explanation of the change and a page number (which refers to a page in the Federal Register).
1. Record the page cites given for your regulation, if any. Bold numbers in the LSA refer to the previous year.
2. Check the Table of Federal Register Issue Pages and Dates in the back of the LSA issue to determine the date of the Federal Register in which the citation you found appears.
3. Find this page in the Federal Register and read it.

Note the date the most recent LSA pamphlet's coverage stops. There will always be a gap between that date and the day you are conducting your research. To fill the gap, you need to find:
1. the last issue of the Federal Register for each complete month not covered by the LSA pamphlet and,
2. the most recent issue of the Federal Register for the current month. There is a "CFR Parts Affected" table in the back of each issue, as well as a table of Federal Register pages and dates. Use the table to determine whether there have been any recent changes affecting your regulation.

Checking for cases interpreting or affecting the validity of your regulations

Courts have a complex role in implementing and interpreting agency regulations. To determine whether judicial opinions have had an impact on the validity of a regulation, you should check a federal regulation on Shepard’s (Lexis) or KeyCite (Westlaw). Coverage differences between the two systems can result in quite distinct results, so this is an area where checking a citation in both systems is usually worth the slightly extra effort.

Researching in electronic formats

Lexis and Westlaw:

Both Lexis and Westlaw provide the current full text of C.F.R. and the Federal Register. Both systems also contain superseded versions of C.F.R. back to the early 1980s in separate databases/sources. Federal Register coverage goes back to 1980 on both systems. On both systems, an alternative to searching the full text of C.F.R. and/or F.R. is to search the versions available in the specialized "area of practice" sources/databases. These contain only the titles pertinent to a particular area of law. As always with the specialty databases/sources, some caution must be used in deciding to search only in limited titles in order to avoid missing relevant material.

Locating federal regulations by topic

To search for a C.F.R. section online by subject, you can use either terms and connectors or natural language searching, using descriptive terms. Another approach, if you know the citation to the enabling statute, is to use the U.S. Code citation in a field/segment search as follows:
Westlaw: cr(20 /5 4011) - searches the credit field
Lexis: authority(20 /5 4011) - searches the authority segment

The above examples will search your terms in only the portion of the document that contains the reference to the statute under which your regulation was promulgated. You can combine search terms with the field segment search if desired, using terms and connectors.

Updating regulations

The online versions of C.F.R. are much more current than the print version, making updating an easier task. Each C.F.R. section online on either Lexis or Westlaw contains a line, near the heading, indicating the last issue of the Federal Register through which the section is updated. (Note: this does not mean that material affecting the section was published on that date in the Federal Register - merely that that is the last date through which the database has been updated.) The date of most recent update varies; it may be from a week or so to nearly a month prior to the date you are researching.

If the particular C.F.R. section has been affected by developments during the gap, Westlaw provides a highlighted "Update" link at the top of the screen. Clicking on this link will take you to the Federal Register database and to the particular Federal Register item that is relevant to the regulation you are updating. On Lexis, you can run a separate search in the Federal Register file to determine whether any updating items exist; alternatively, you can search in a combined file that includes both C.F.R. and Federal Register documents.

Checking for cases interpreting or affecting the validity of your regulations

C.F.R. sections can be Shepardized on Lexis or KeyCited on Westlaw. Another alternative is to construct a terms and connectors search that uses the regulation cite as a search term.

Internet sources

The GPO Access site http://www.gpoaccess.gov/
provides search and updating capability for the C.F.R. and the Federal Register.

GPO Access permits searching for regulations by citation or subject and includes the parallel authorities table in which cross references from U.S.C. citations to accompanying regulations in the C.F.R. may be found.

This web site has proven to be reliable and current, and is useful for updating regulations without incurring the costs associated with Lexis and Westlaw. To update a C.F.R. citation on GPO Access:

Go to the GPO Access web site by going to Federal Resources from the library’s home page (GPO Access is the first of the federal links) or by going directly to the site at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html. Select List of CFR Sections Affected. The List of CFR Sections Affected (LSA) is the tool researchers use to make sure they have the most recent changes to regulations and to find out whether there are any proposed amendments pending.

• Use Last Month’s List of CFR Parts Affected (the link is on the left frame) to determine whether there were any changes to your regulation between the publication of the annual volume containing the regulation and the end of the previous month.

• Use Current List of CFR Parts Affected (also linked on the left frame) to determine whether there have been any changes to the regulation within the past month. This component should be current to the previous business day.

GPO Access also offers beta access to a much more current electronic version of the C.F.R. at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ecfr/ . Using this version makes it unnecessary to use the LSA to update regulations. However, Boolean searching is not yet possible in this version – you must browse by C.F.R. title and part.

Agency web sites may include statutes and regulations relating to the activities of the agency. This is less true since September 11, 2001 as many agencies have removed a great deal of content from their web sites.

Advantages of using an agency web site include the fact that they are free of charge and one need not know the precise citation to statutes and regulations in order to locate them. Be aware, however, that some such sites do not provide sufficient information as to the source or currency of the information provided.