<P> Today, in the words of Stanford law professor Lawrence Friedman: "American cases rarely cite foreign materials . Courts occasionally cite a British classic or two, a famous old case, or a nod to Blackstone; but current British law almost never gets any mention ." Foreign law has never been cited as binding precedent, but as a reflection of the shared values of Anglo - American civilization or even Western civilization in general . </P> <P> Federal law originates with the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enact statutes for certain limited purposes like regulating interstate commerce . The United States Code is the official compilation and codification of the general and permanent federal statutes . Many statutes give executive branch agencies the power to create regulations, which are published in the Federal Register and codified into the Code of Federal Regulations . Regulations generally also carry the force of law under the Chevron doctrine . Many lawsuits turn on the meaning of a federal statute or regulation, and judicial interpretations of such meaning carry legal force under the principle of stare decisis . </P> <P> During the 18th and 19th centuries, federal law traditionally focused on areas where there was an express grant of power to the federal government in the federal Constitution, like the military, money, foreign relations (especially international treaties), tariffs, intellectual property (specifically patents and copyrights), and mail . Since the start of the 20th century, broad interpretations of the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the Constitution have enabled federal law to expand into areas like aviation, telecommunications, railroads, pharmaceuticals, antitrust, and trademarks . In some areas, like aviation and railroads, the federal government has developed a comprehensive scheme that preempts virtually all state law, while in others, like family law, a relatively small number of federal statutes (generally covering interstate and international situations) interacts with a much larger body of state law . In areas like antitrust, trademark, and employment law, there are powerful laws at both the federal and state levels that coexist with each other . In a handful of areas like insurance, Congress has enacted laws expressly refusing to regulate them as long as the states have laws regulating them (see, e.g., the McCarran - Ferguson Act). </P> <P> After the President signs a bill into law (or Congress enacts it over his veto), it is delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) where it is assigned a law number, and prepared for publication as a slip law . Public laws, but not private laws, are also given legal statutory citation by the OFR . At the end of each session of Congress, the slip laws are compiled into bound volumes called the United States Statutes at Large, and they are known as session laws . The Statutes at Large present a chronological arrangement of the laws in the exact order that they have been enacted . </P>

All of the laws in the united states