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LRAW Research Spring 2025

Learning Objectives: Federal Regulations

Upon completing this Federal Regulations unit, you will be able to:

  • Recall that statutes authorize agencies to write regulations at the federal level;
  • Describe how the Code of Federal Regulations is organized into titles, parts, and sections;
  • Use the AUTHORITY note of a federal regulation to identify its statutory authority;
  • Use the SOURCE note of a federal regulation to find where it was first published as a final rule, and any subsequent amendments, in the Federal Register;
  • Identify the Federal Register’s role in publishing proposed regulations, requests for public comment, and final regulations;
  • Find federal regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations by citation, or by subject using an index or a basic keyword search;
  • Identify relevant federal regulations using the annotations to a federal statute, or by using applicable federal agency websites;
  • Use a table of contents to find other relevant federal regulations and to contextualize them in a regulatory scheme;
  • Find cases and secondary sources that have cited a federal regulation using the major citators;
  • Analyze a federal regulation and determine its relevance to a legal issue in the context of a set of facts;
  • Use the Federal Register on govinfo.gov and eCFR to update federal regulations;
  • Interpret the flags and signals used by the major citators to update federal regulations; and
  • Cite federal regulations using the Bluebook.