Legal Q: Define the differences in the different Federal Laws/Codes/Regulations/etc.

Given this here post, I realized that there’s a lot of Federal laws and codes out yonder.

I know there’s a U.S. Code, a Code of Federal Regulations, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, treaties, international agreements, and the like. . .

Is there a hierachy of how these things work? I mean, I know the Constitution is the “law of the land”, but does the USC dictate the CFR and thus a FAA FAR/AIM? Where does the FCC get it’s authority? Does one dictate the other, or do they work in coexistence, and if they do, which supercedes what? I’m not worried about the states themselves, since I know that anything more stringent than a Federal law would be overriding, but just what at the Federal level is the patriarch to the family tree?

Tripler
My apologies for all the damned acronyms.

It’s pretty simple to outline, though complex as the orbital dynamics of Saturn’s rings to get into in detail.

Every jurisdiction – Federal government, States – has a written Constitution outlining how the government works and what it can and cannot do.

The Constitution authorizes a legislature (Congress for the Feds.) and an executive/administrative program headed by a governor in the states and by the President for the Feds.

The legislature is empowered to enact statutes in accord with the Constitution. Those statutes are codified into a standard format. North Carolina has the General Statutes, New York has 46 chapters referenced by their subject name (Penal Law, General Municipal Law, Insurance Law, Civil Procedure Law and Rules, etc.)

For the Federal Government, that codification is the United States Code.

Pursuant to statute, administrative bodies may be empowered to write regulations implementing the general terms of the statutes. For example, HUD is authorized to issue Community Development Block Grants and to adopt rules for how they are awarded, how they may be spent, etc. Each state has a collection of administrative regulations of this sort, again usually codified.

For the Federal Government, the codification is the Code of Federal Regulations.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice is the “penal and criminal procedure law” for the Armed Forces, applied through courts martial. I suspect it is adopted as a statute, but a person with knowledge of military law would have to speak to its status and its relevance outside the military.

In addition there are Executive Orders, which are essentially presidential proclamations. Because the pres. issues them w/o input of the Congress, they are of limited scope, typically affecting only government contractors. (For instance, government contractors have stricter affirmative action requirements than other companies because of Exec. Orders; it’s the price of doing business with the government.) Of course, many EO’s are just ceremonial proclamations.

The UCMJ is 10 U.S.C. Chp. 47, BTW. Because it’s in the U.S. Code, we can determine that Poly is correct that the UCMJ is statutory law passed by Congress.

Treaties are separate from the USC and are included in a publication entitled Treaties in Force, which I’ve never had cause to use much.

The FAR (the Federal Acquisition Regulation) is 48 C.F.R. Chp. 1. Like the rest of the C.F.R., these regs are drafted by federal agencies that are ultimately accountable to the president.

–Cliffy