<P> Regulations are adopted pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Regulations are first proposed and published in the Federal Register (FR or Fed . Reg .) and subject to a public comment period . Eventually, after a period for public comment and revisions based on comments received, a final version is published in the Federal Register . The regulations are codified and incorporated into the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) which is published once a year on a rolling schedule . </P> <P> Besides regulations formally promulgated under the APA, federal agencies also frequently promulgate an enormous amount of forms, manuals, policy statements, letters, and rulings . These documents may be considered by a court as persuasive authority as to how a particular statute or regulation may be interpreted (known as Skidmore deference), but are not entitled to Chevron deference . </P> <P> Unlike the situation with the states, there is no plenary reception statute at the federal level that continued the common law and thereby granted federal courts the power to formulate legal precedent like their English predecessors . Federal courts are solely creatures of the federal Constitution and the federal Judiciary Acts . However, it is universally accepted that the Founding Fathers of the United States, by vesting "judicial power" into the Supreme Court and the inferior federal courts in Article Three of the United States Constitution, thereby vested in them the implied judicial power of common law courts to formulate persuasive precedent; this power was widely accepted, understood, and recognized by the Founding Fathers at the time the Constitution was ratified . Several legal scholars have argued that the federal judicial power to decide "cases or controversies" necessarily includes the power to decide the precedential effect of those cases and controversies . </P> <P> The difficult question is whether federal judicial power extends to formulating binding precedent through strict adherence to the rule of stare decisis . This is where the act of deciding a case becomes a limited form of lawmaking in itself, in that an appellate court's rulings will thereby bind itself and lower courts in future cases (and therefore also impliedly binds all persons within the court's jurisdiction). Prior to a major change to federal court rules in 2007, about one - fifth of federal appellate cases were published and thereby became binding precedents, while the rest were unpublished and bound only the parties to each case . </P>

One of the purposes of the us judicial system is to ___