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.
ruleSet belongs to STATE_RULES and FEDERAL_RULES; articleNumber to
CONSTITUTION and STATE_CONSTITUTION.
Fields that are reserved and not yet populated
We publish these keys so the shape does not change under you when they start carrying values. Today they are null everywhere.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A proposed rule that was never finalized, or was withdrawn, must not look like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 range over lastAmendedYear and effectiveYear.
A corpus whose sections carry neither is not reachable by a year filter at all,
and will return zero results rather than an error.
Check the table above before filtering: for proposed rules in particular, a year
window returns nothing by design.
Related
- Corpus Types for what each corpus contains.
- Amendment History for where the years come from.
- Status & Currency for
actStatusandgoodLawStatus.