Federal Register

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 16th of March, 1936, the Federal Register published its first issue. A significant gap in American governance had gone unfilled until that moment. Federal agencies could issue binding regulations with no central, public record of their existence. The journal that closed this gap runs every weekday except on federal holidays. It carries the rule changes, proposals, and formal notices that shape how American law operates in practice. Who is legally required to know what it contains? How did the Federal Register Act set all of this in motion, and what has expanded its scope in the decades since?

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• 2. Making Rules in Public

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  A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, called an NPRM, is how a federal agency signals its intent to change or add a rule. Every NPRM must be published in the Federal Register, and it must include contact information for those who want to comment. The NPRM must also announce any public meetings where the proposed rule will be discussed.

  The notice and comment process gives citizens and organizations a formal route for shaping the regulations that govern them. The Administrative Procedure Act establishes this requirement. Public comments are not optional reading for agencies. When an agency publishes a final rule, it must address the concerns raised during the comment period. That discussion appears in print alongside the rule itself. Final rules are later reorganized by topic and codified in the Code of Federal Regulations.

  Publication in the Federal Register constitutes constructive notice. Courts take judicial notice of the Federal Register's contents, treating them as established legal fact.

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• 3. Four Categories, One Record

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  Presidential Documents, covering executive orders, proclamations, and administrative orders, opens every daily issue of the Federal Register. Rules and Regulations follows, collecting policy statements and official interpretations of existing regulations from federal agencies. Proposed Rules is third, open to both agency-initiated proposals and petitions submitted to agencies directly by the public. Notices closes out the issue, covering scheduled hearings, meetings open to the public, grant applications, and adjudicatory proceedings.

  71 FR 24924, dated the 7th of April, 2006, is a published Federal Register citation. That example shows the standard form: volume number, the letters "FR," page number, and a date in parentheses. The United States Government Manual, a reference guide to agency programs and activities, is published as a special edition of the Federal Register.

  Copies of the Federal Register may be obtained from the Government Publishing Office.

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• 4. Origins and Expansion

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  The Federal Register system was created on the 26th of July, 1935, under the Federal Register Act. That legislation addressed a genuine problem: agencies were issuing rules and orders with no reliable central record that citizens or courts could consult. The first issue appeared a few months later. Then, in 1946, the Administrative Procedure Act required agencies to publish more detailed information about their rulemaking documents. This substantially expanded what agencies were required to publish in the Federal Register. The Office of the Federal Register, which sits within the National Archives and Records Administration, compiles each issue.

  As a work of the United States government, the Federal Register carries no copyright restrictions and is in the public domain.

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• 5. From Print to API

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  The Federal Register has been available online since 1994. Federal depository libraries throughout the United States receive copies in paper or microfiche format. Some major libraries outside the country carry it as well.

  In 2003, the Federal E-Government eRulemaking Initiative established Regulations.gov. That website lets the public access entire rulemaking dockets and submit comments directly to the agencies responsible for them. The Federal Docket Management System launched in 2005 to help agencies manage those dockets. In April 2009, Citation Technologies created a free, searchable website covering Federal Register articles from 1996 to the present.

  On the 25th of July, 2010, the Federal Register 2.0 website went live. It was a collaboration between the developers who created GovPulse.us and the two federal offices responsible for publishing the Federal Register. On the 1st of August, 2011, the Federal Register announced a new application programming interface. Fully RESTful, it used the HATEOAS architecture and delivered results in JSON format. Client libraries were made available in Ruby and Python.

  For researchers who need deeper historical access, HeinOnline offers a searchable PDF archive dating back to 1936. LexisNexis has covered it in searchable text from the 1st of July, 1980, and Westlaw from the 1st of January, 1981. Westlaw's coverage also includes the official English text of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. That treaty became effective on the 1st of January, 1988.

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