null, because most belong to a different corpus.
A Federal Register rule has a docket number and a comment-close date.
A US Code section has a source credit and a chapter.
A court rule has a rule set.
None of those apply to the others, and a null there means the field does not
apply, not that we are missing it.
This page tells the two apart.
The rule
A
null on a field this page marks as not applicable for your corpusType
carries no information. A null on a field marked expected is a real gap,
and worth telling us about.Always present
These carry a value on every section in every corpus.By corpus type
o = expected to carry a value. - = not applicable, ignore the null.
Two families sit outside this table because they belong to corpora it does not
have a column for.
ruleSet and ruleSetCode belong to STATE_RULES and FEDERAL_RULES.
articleNumber and articleName belong to CONSTITUTION and
STATE_CONSTITUTION.
Version and supersession fields
These are populated where a publisher states the relation itself, and null everywhere else. Null here means the publisher drew no link we could read, not that the field is unimplemented.
Where each one actually carries a value:
supersededByandsupersedesare populated on the corpora whose publishers print a supersession statement: state agency guidance bulletins, state court rules, and theI&N Dec.reporter underAGENCY_ADJUDICATION. A document can supersede several predecessors, so the value can be more than oneactIdjoined by;. See Status & Currency for how to read the direction of the link before treating it as fatal.versionIdis populated where a publisher versions a document separately from the document itself, which today means Colorado regulations, where it is the only version pointer that exists.
Point-in-time text: asOf
GET /us/statutes/section/{actId}/body accepts asOf=YYYY-MM-DD and returns the section’s text as
it stood on that date, for the same 6 credits as an ordinary body fetch.
The response carries an asOf block naming what you are holding: a published edition, a
reconstruction from observed change history, or neither.
Read source and isBounded before using the text.
isBounded: true means we observed no change affecting that date, which is not the same as there
having been none.
Full contract, per-corpus behaviour and the billing rules are on
Point-in-time law.
Amendment fields on the Federal Register
amendmentYears on a final rule is the year that rule was published, which
is the year it amended the CFR.
A proposed rule carries no amendment years at all, because it amended
nothing.
That asymmetry is deliberate.
A proposed rule that was never finalized, or was withdrawn, must not look like
enacted law on the field a currency query trusts.
Filtering by year
yearFrom and yearTo match a section on any of three years, in this order:
lastAmendedYear, the publisher’s own credited amendment.- The year of the section’s
effectiveDate, for a section adopted once and never amended. Calling an adoption an amendment would be a wrong answer rather than a missing one, so those sections carry nolastAmendedYearand are reached this way instead. The year itself is an index field and is not returned on a result; readeffectiveDatefor the date it came from. - The document’s own publication or issue year, for the corpora where that is what the document is dated by: Federal Register proposed rules, agency guidance, adjudications and the treaty record.
The third case is deliberately scoped to those corpora and is not a general
fallback. On statutes and regulations the underlying year field records when we
last ingested the text, not when the law changed, so matching it would answer a
recent-year window with entire state codes.
amendmentYears: “when was this published” and “what did this amend” are
different questions, and only the second one is silent for a proposal.
Related
- Corpus Types for what each corpus contains.
- Amendment History for where the years come from.
- Status & Currency for
actStatusandgoodLawStatus.