Duties
Duties
The Office of the Law Revision Counsel has two main functions: (1) to maintain the United States Code and (2) to draft legislation to enact individual titles of the Code as positive law. This position is geared toward the second function.
The codification work of the Office involves a number of tasks, including:
- Drafting codification bills to restate existing law as positive law titles of the United States Code.
- Drafting conforming amendments and technical amendments to existing law to update the United States Code.
- Drafting an explanation document that accompanies a codification bill, which includes creating table entries explaining disposition of provisions affected by the codification bill, drafting detailed revision notes to explain word changes, etc.
- Reviewing draft codification and follow-up bills and explanation documents, including proofreading and substantive review, to ensure that no change in meaning or effect of the law is made by any such bill.
- Researching legal sources such as legislative histories, court cases, regulations, etc., to ensure proposed restatement conforms to the understood policy and intent of Congress.
- Adhering to codification style in drafting bills and consulting other style manuals.
- Requesting comments from congressional committees, government agencies, and interested private parties and considering those comments in drafting codification bills.
- Consulting with attorney editors on matters relating to non-positive law titles of the U.S. Code.
- Assisting other codification attorneys in updating style manual and developing codification guidelines.
- Adapting to a changing drafting editor environment that is currently part of the modernization of Office technologies.
In addition to the basic tasks required to enact individual titles of the Code as positive law, other duties may be required, such as assisting Code editors in editorial reclassification of non-positive law titles and in other editorial-related work.