Federal Register

is an association established for educational, informational and scientific purposes. We have nearly 500 members dedicated to the evolving interests, services and needs of law librarians and our related community. We are a regional chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries, with a geographic focus on the Washington, D.C. region.") The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) is an association established for educational, informational and scientific purposes. We have nearly 500 members dedicated to the evolving interests, services and needs of law librarians and our related community. We are a regional chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries, with a geographic focus on the Washington, D.C. region. In earlier times U.S. Executive branch agencies and the Office of the President would each publish their own regulations in various separate publications, be they gazettes, bulletins, rulings, digests, pamphlets, notices, codes, certificates, orders, and the like. This profusion of authoritative documents, especially as agency regulations began to mushroom in the 1930’s, made it extremely difficult for the public to determine where a U.S. regulation could be found, when it was issued and whether it had been altered or revoked.1 The U.S. Department of Justice itself had a difficult time determining the status of regulations as became embarrassingly apparent when the Department had to acknowledge before the Supreme Court that an Executive order it was trying to enforce had been inadvertently revoked.2 To remedy this situation Congress, in 1935, passed the Federal Register Act, which empowered the Archivist of the United States to establish a division within the National Archives to be responsible, with the Government Publishing Office, for the publication of a daily Federal Register under the authority of a newly established Administrative Committee of the Federal Register .3 The Federal Register Act requires that the Federal Register , begun on March 14, 1936, be the Federal government’s comprehensive vehicle for publishing all agency promulgated rules and regulations as well as all Presidential proclamations and executive orders or other such documents that the President determines has general applicability and legal effect or as may be required by Act of Congress. Other documents, such as notices of meetings, agency collection activities, applications, and policy statements may be included as well. However, the law does not permit the publication of comments or news items in the Federal Register .4 After the enactment of the Administrative Procedures Act in 1946, notices of proposed rulemaking are now also required to be published.5 The proposed rules are to be accompanied by a description of the subject and issues involved and from 1947 to 1972 these descriptions in the preamble to the proposed rules were about the only place to find an explanation or rationale for a rule. Beginning in the 1960s finalized rules began to be accompanied in the Federal Register by brief explanations, usually just after the text of the rule, but it was not until 1973 that final rules were required by the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register to have in their preamble to the rule a statement summarizing the general subject matter of the rule.6 A rule effective on April 1, 1977, requires that comments to proposed rules and answers to them be summarized in the preamble before the rule and it also requires that agencies submit their final and proposed rules with specific preamble heading material.7 The preamble information published in the Federal Register to a proposed or final rule is the primary published source for its “regulatory history” and one of the few means to determine “regulatory intent.” The Federal Register Act originally provided, within six months, for a complete compilation of all existing regulations promulgated prior to the first publication of the Federal Register . However, this was d