Legal Research

The Federal Register is published daily, Monday through Friday, except offical Federal holidays. It is a wealth of regulations (new and revised), legal notices and executive actions. It is the "newpaper" of all the Federal agencies and the rest of the Executive branch. We just got the final print issue of volume 75 of the Federal Register. The final page count for volume 75 is 82,589 which falls a close second behind the year 2000 when the total was 83,294 pages. To give you an idea of how it has grown, in the first year of publication in 1935, the entire volume was only 2,268 pages (to be fair that first volume was only March through December.) Another way of looking at the full run of volume 75 is that it fills almost 12 linear feet of shelving. Because most researchs these days only use the digital version of the Federal Register they can't appreciate how much the Feds generate in a year. Attached to this post is a picture of the whole year, with a law librarian added to give a sense of scale. Click on the small image to see the full-size version of the image in a pop-up window.