Today’s interview is with Shawn Nevers, the director of the Brigham Young University Law Library. Tomorrow, we will publish a post highlighting some of the Law Library’s collections related to the U.S. Code to celebrate its 100th anniversary.
Tell us a little about your educational and work background.
I am currently the director of the BYU Law Library and have worked here for almost 20 years in various roles. I also attended law school at BYU and then earned my library degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
How did you develop an interest in studying the origins of the US Code?
I have always enjoyed teaching statutes in my legal research classes because I think they are not discussed as much as they should be in law school. About 10 years ago, I was working on a research problem that involved a statutory note in the United States Code. I became fascinated with statutory notes, and after reading everything I could about them, decided there was more to be said. Julie Graves Krishnaswami and I researched and wrote an article called “The Shadow Code: Statutory Notes in the United States Code.” During the research for that article, I found some very interesting nuggets about the origin of the United States Code that I wanted to pursue in a future article, which I am in the process of writing now.
What was life like for legal researchers before the US Code, and why was that system replaced?
The first official codification of U.S. law occurred in the 1870s with the Revised Statutes of 1874, but there was no plan to continuously update it. So, if researchers wanted to see the official version of the law, they would need to check the Revised Statutes and each subsequent volume of the Statutes at Large. This was impractical, and so many researchers turned to commercial publications such as Federal Statutes Annotated and United States Compiled Statutes Annotated, but there was no official code or compilation for researchers to use. The goal of the U.S. Code was to create such an official source that researchers could depend on.
Why do you consider June 30 to be the US Code’s birthday?
June 30, 1926, is when the bill making the United States Code prima facie evidence of the law was signed into law by President Coolidge. This is the date that also appears in the preface of the 1926 edition of the Code, written by Representative Roy G. Fitzgerald, who was the Chairman of the House Committee on the Revision of the Laws at the time.
It is important to remember that the U.S. Code itself was not passed into law, which is what its creators hoped for. The compromise was that the Code would be prima facie evidence of the law that could still be rebutted by reference to a discrepancy in the Statutes at Large. Congress is still in the process of examining and passing individual titles of the Code into positive law 100 years later.
What are one or two interesting facts you learned during your research?
When there was opposition in the Senate to making the U.S. Code a positive law code and repealing all the underlying statutes, one proposal was to institute a “twilight zone” (p. 4) where the Code would be prima facie evidence of the law for one year. During the “twilight zone,” errors in the Code could be corrected, and then the Code would become positive law after one year passed. This proposal failed, but it would have eliminated many of the problems we deal with today regarding positive law codification.
While not something that I learned, during my research, I did get to hold the original document that sketched out the 50 title structure of the U.S. Code, as well as Representative Fitzgerald’s copy of the first edition of the U.S. Code. For a U.S. Code fanatic like me, that was pretty cool.
