What’s the Difference Between Case Law and Statute Law?
Statute law is enacted: a legislature votes general, forward-looking rules into existence, and they are collected into organized codes. Case law is decided: courts resolve individual disputes, and the published reasoning binds later courts (the full mechanics are in what case law is). The two are partners, not rivals. Statutes state the rule; cases determine what the rule means when real facts press on its language. That is why competent research on a statutory question never stops at the statute — the section’s working meaning lives in the decisions applying it, which is also why annotated codes, which list those decisions under each section, are among the most valuable tools in legal research.
Can Case Law Override a Statute?
Not in the sense of replacing it — a court cannot substitute its preferred rule for a valid statute’s. But courts hold two real powers over statutes. First, constitutional review: a court can strike down a statute that violates the federal or a state constitution, after which the statute is unenforceable even if it stays on the books. Second, interpretation: where language is ambiguous, the courts’ reading becomes the statute’s operative meaning. The influence runs both ways — a legislature that dislikes a court’s interpretation can amend the statute to abrogate it, and legislatures regularly do. What a legislature cannot do by ordinary statute is override a constitutional ruling; that requires amending the constitution itself. Meanwhile a valid statute displaces earlier judge-made common law on the same subject.
Reading a Statute Citation: 28 USC 1334
Statute citations are compact addresses. Take 28 U.S.C. § 1334:
- 28 — the title: the US Code’s subject-matter volumes. Title 28 covers the judiciary and judicial procedure.
- U.S.C. — the code: United States Code, the official codification of federal statutes. (U.S.C.A. and U.S.C.S. are the annotated commercial versions of the same text.)
- § 1334 — the section. This one gives federal district courts jurisdiction over bankruptcy cases.
The same grammar reads any federal citation — 11 U.S.C. § 305, for instance, is title 11 (bankruptcy), section 305, the provision letting a bankruptcy court abstain from a case. Regulations parallel it: 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11 is title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations. State citations vary in dress — some states use numbered titles, others named codes like Cal. Penal Code § 187 — but the structure is always jurisdiction’s code, subdivision, section. Full citation form is covered in how to cite a law case.
Finding Federal Law: USC and CFR
Federal statutes start life as session laws (public laws) and are codified into the United States Code, maintained by the House’s Office of the Law Revision Counsel, which publishes the current text on its website. The government’s govinfo site publishes official versions too. For everyday research, Cornell’s Legal Information Institute is the most usable free mirror of both the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations — the codification of agency regulations, whose daily updates appear first in the Federal Register (the government’s eCFR service tracks the current text continuously). Two habits keep federal research honest: note the code version’s currency date, and remember that a very recent public law may not be codified yet — the session law itself is the authority in the gap.