A statute is a law enacted by a legislative body. In the United States, Congress creates new, and amends existing, federal law. Briefly, a law enacted by Congress appears in United States Statutes at Large in chronological order by Public Law number. Today, new federal laws also appear in relevant sections of GPO Access and Thomas .
States also publish their laws by date of enactment and by subject.
Laws arranged in chronological order usually are called session laws while codified statutes are referred to as codes. Not all states, however, use this terminology. Pennsylvania, for example, does not call its codified statutes a code. Instead, it uses the term, Code, to refer to codified regulations. When counties and cities enact legislation, they usually refer to it as an ordinance.