6. That’s true even if there are citations to the Statutes at Large. Code itself is not law.

On March 18, 1947, one of the great justices, Felix Frankfurter, gave one of the great speeches on statutory interpretation. He called it “Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes.”1 Sixty years later, we consider his speech a classic on how to read the statutes. The irony, however, is that we no longer read the statutes. Not in the sense that Frankfurter did. Frankfurter actually did read the actual statutes. He did not read the United States Code; he read the Statutes at Large. He jauntily described himself as “one for whom the Statutes at Large constitute his staple reading.”2 Frankfurter, in other words, did not read imitation law; he read real law. So did everyone else, in Frankfurter's day.

Nowadays, we don't. We read imitation law.

Consider: A text passes both houses of Congress. It is printed on parchment and presented to the President. If it becomes law, it is sent to the National Archives and preserved there. These texts, not *284 any others, are the “Laws of the United States” that form part of the “supreme Law of the Land.”3 They are session laws, and from the early days we have published them in a set of books called the United States Statutes at Large.

We do not read them anymore. We do not cite to them, we do not quote from them, and--the most recent development--we do not use them in statutory interpretation.

We do not like to read session laws, of course. It can be tough going. “Many laws on which lawmakers are asked to vote are not in fact readable, consisting as they do of a string of amendments to existing laws, changing three words in subsection 5 of section 2 of article 7 of something already on the books.”4 Who wants to read that?

So we read the United States Code instead. The Code is--no disrespect intended--a Frankenstein's monster of session laws. The Code is made by taking the session laws, hacking them to pieces, rearranging them, and stitching them back together in a way that gives them false life. Many pieces are altered, and many others are thrown away. The result is something like a Cliffs Notes guide to the real law. That is all the Code is, and that is all it is supposed to be.

The Code is prepared by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, which operates under the supervision of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives. The head of that office in Frankfurter's day, Dr. Charles Zinn, explained that the Code organizes the session laws “so that you will be able to find them with less trouble than you would have by referring only to the Statutes at Large.”5 The Code is not law; it is a law locator, and a very useful one.

The Code is at its most useful when one session law has been amended by another: “[T]o find the present status of that law would *285 be difficult if the search were limited to the Statutes at Large. ... [I]t would be necessary to go through each volume of the Statutes at Large since the original enactment and try to piece it all together.”6 The Code carries out the amendments for us, ministerially (for the most part), giving us a single clean text. The rest of the amendatory statute, with all its clues to meaning-- titles, headings; findings, purposes; structure, arrangement--is thrown away.

The Code can also be useful when one session law affects another without directly amending it--but only if we recognize what is going on behind the curtain. Consider the statute that charters the Senate's legislative drafting office: section 1303(a) of the Revenue Act of 1918 (40 Stat. 1141). The first sentence provides:

That there is hereby created a Legislative Drafting Service under the direction of two draftsmen, one of whom shall be appointed by the President of the Senate, and one by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, without reference to political affiliations and solely on the ground of fitness to perform the duties of the office.

Section 602 of the Revenue Act of 1941 (55 Stat. 726) amended this by striking “President of the Senate” and inserting “President pro tempore of the Senate.” So far so good. But then, the second sentence of section 531 of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 (84 Stat. 1204) provides:

... the provisions of section 1303 of the Revenue Act of 1918 shall have no further applicability of any kind to the Speaker or to any committee, officer, employee, or property of the House of Representatives.

How does the Code show this? By rewriting 1303(a) holistically and placing it in two sections, 2 U.S.C. 271 and 272:

§ 271. Establishment

There shall be in the Senate an office to be known as the Office of the Legislative Counsel, and to be under *286 the direction of the Legislative Counsel of the Senate.

§ 272. Legislative Counsel

The Legislative Counsel shall be appointed by the President pro tempore of the Senate, without reference to political affiliations and solely on the ground of fitness to perform the duties of the office.

Consider: What is the official name of the office? The Code gives one answer, the statutes another. How many draftsmen are at its head? A Code reader answers “one, of course,” while a session-law reader answers “literally, two ... but one is appointed by the Speaker, and 1303 no longer applies to the Speaker--so effectively, probably only one.”

So the single clean text of 271 and 272 tells us all we need to know--for our garden-variety legal hack work. For statutory interpretation it is useless, even misleading.

Preparing these single clean Code texts--the faithfully ministerial ones, the aggressively holistic ones, and the many varieties in between--and placing them in the Code is called “classification,” and classification is “a matter of opinion and judgment.”7

When we remember this, we are fine. The Code is just the “opinion and judgment” of one House office. Ultimately, as Abner Mikva reminded us, “it is for the courts to find the meaning of all these statutes, all the amendments to those statutes, and all the amendments to the amendments.”8

The Code is only “prima facie” evidence of the law,9 while the Statutes at Large is “legal” evidence,10 and “the very meaning of *287 ‘prima facie’ is that the Code cannot prevail over the Statutes at Large when the two are inconsistent.”11 Thus:

If you go into court and cite a section of the United States Code, your adversary may bring in a dozen Statutes at Large to show that what is in the Code is not an accurate statement. As a result, he may prevail because the Statutes at Large are legal evidence of the law, whereas the Code is only prima facie evidence.12

And yet nowadays the Code is what we cite to, quote from, and interpret. We no longer read the Statutes at Large.