LawEdge: U.S. Code and CFR

The U.S. Code is an intellectually rich and rewarding puzzle, but piecing it together requires repetitive, mechanical tasks. Repeatedly flipping back and forth to the right page can deter students from reading and learning to parse the statute and regulations.

What if we could automate mechanical tasks so that students could focus on the intellectually rewarding aspects of statutory interpretation and analysis?

This is the idea behind our innovative electronic statutory supplements.

LawEdge implements features tax professors, students, and practitioners have wanted for decades, including automated identification of all defined terms (with previews and links to context-specific definitions), automated cross links between code provisions and regulations, seamless integration of inflation adjustments with the original text of the Code, and rapid offline search by keyword or section number--all for a fraction of the cost of traditional paperback statutory supplements.

Popup Definitions

The US Code includes thousands of defined terms. You have to understand what each of the defined terms means to understand what provisions containing those defined terms means.

Unfortunately, defined terms are not always labeled as such every time they appear. Even when defined terms are labeled as defined terms, understanding one provision may require flipping back and forth to several other locations in the code. This process can be slow and cumbersome with paper statutes. Even electronic statutes like Westlaw or Lexis often will not take you to the precise location in the code where a definition appears, but will instead take you to a the section containing the definition, forcing you to search for the definition yourself.

LawEdge makes working with defined terms simple and easy. Click a defined term to instantly view its meaning.

Definitions are context-specific and do not apply to all sections of the code. For example, the definition of “property” in Section 317(a) of the Internal Revenue Code does not apply to Section 351 of the same title.

LawEdge automatically recognizes the context to which a definition applies and connects you to the correct definition, if one is provided in the same title.

Colors

Structural components are color coded so you can more easily recognize them and visually jump to the right text element.

Search

Suppose that you know exactly where in the tax code you want to look something up. For example, suppose that you want to go to § 21(b)(2)(B).

With a paper statutory supplement, you could flip to section 21, then look for subsection (b), then read down to paragraph (2) and finally find subparagraph (B). The entire process might take 30 seconds or so, and along the way you might accidentally look at the wrong provision.

In Lexis or Westlaw, you'd click menu after menu, expanding trees as you go, and the entire process would also be slow. Once you got to a certain point, you could search for (b) or (2), but you'd get false positives and have to manually find the right spot.

With LawEdge, this process is nearly instantaneous and error free. Just use the search bar at the top right of the screen (the icon that looks like a magnifying glass) and type 21 b2B. The search is not case sensitive so 21 b2b will also work.