Editing United States Code (section)

===Early compilations===

Early efforts at codifying the Acts of Congress were undertaken by private publishers; these were useful shortcuts for research purposes, but had no official status. Congress undertook an official codification called the ''[[Revised Statutes of the United States]]'' approved June 22, 1874, for the laws in effect as of December 1, 1873. Congress re-enacted a corrected version in 1878. The 1874 version of the Revised Statutes were enacted as positive law, but the 1878 version was not and subsequent enactments of Congress were not incorporated into the official code, so that over time researchers once again had to delve through many volumes of the ''[[United States Statutes at Large|Statutes at Large]]''.

According to the preface to the Code, "From 1897 to 1907 a commission was engaged in an effort to codify the great mass of accumulating legislation. The work of the commission involved an expenditure of over $300,000, but was never carried to completion." Only the [[Criminal Code of 1909]] and the [[Judicial Code of 1911]] were enacted. In the absence of a comprehensive official code, private publishers once again collected the more recent statutes into unofficial codes. The first edition of the ''United States Code'' (published as Statutes at Large Volume 44, Part 1) includes cross-reference tables between the USC and two of these unofficial codes, ''United States Compiled Statutes Annotated'' by [[Thomson West|West Publishing Co.]] and ''Federal Statutes Annotated'' by Edward Thompson Co.