Subject:
Positive Law

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Dear Subscriber,

By request, before I get into the "wages aren't income" claim, I
want to quickly address another claim that comes up from time to
time, having to do with "positive law." The claim is that Title 26
of the United States Code (i.e., the tax code) isn't "positive
law," and that it therefore doesn't apply to the general public.
(For a reason I don't fully understand, some cite 26 USC 7806 as
support for this claim, though all that section says is that cross-
references, tables of contents, arrangement of sections and
descriptive matters in the code are not the law--only the text of
the sections is.)

When Congress passes laws, it does so via "public laws," which are
published in the "Statutes at Large." Many laws have been enacted
as one "public law" and subsequently amended many, many times by
other "public laws." Technically, ALL of the public laws put
together constitute the law. However, that can get really
inconvenient and confusing to follow.

Suppose you're in the business of importing cars into the U.S., and
there is a tariff on doing that. To figure out your legal
requirements, you could search ALL of the Statutes at Large (since
the beginning of the country), one at a time, find where the tariff
came into being, and then find every single amendment to it since
its inception. But it sure would be tough to do all that just to
figure out what the law CURRENTLY requires of you.

And so the "United States Code" came into being. It constitutes the
cumulative end result of compiling ALL of the Statutes at Large.
The "Titles" of the United States Code represent the original law,
as altered by all of the subsequent amendments. Or at least, it's
supposed to represent that.

That's where the concept of "positive law" comes in. Many of the 50
"Titles" of the United States Code have been verified to match
exactly the underlying Statutes at Large. As 1 USC 204 explains,
"whenever titles of such Code shall have been enacted into positive
law the text thereof shall be legal evidence of the laws therein
contained." In other words, they can be treated as the law itself,
because they match.

On the other hand, titles that are NOT "positive law" constitute
only "prima facie" evidence of the law itself. In other words,
you're allowed to assume them to accurately represent the law, but
if there is any discrepancy between the "Title" and the Statutes at
Large, the Statutes at Large "win."

The titles which have been enacted as "positive law" (for those of
you who care) are Titles 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 23,
28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46, and 49. The
Internal Revenue Code of 1954 was also enacted separately, as
Volume 68A of the Statutes at Large.

So what does this mean for you and me? Dang near nothing. When it
comes to the federal tax code (Title 26), I have so far found only
ONE discrepancy between Title 26 and the underlying Statutes at
Large. The title of Part I of Subchapter N in Title 26 appears as
"Source rules and other general rules relating to foreign income,"
while in the Statutes at Large that title has always been
"Determination of sources of income." (Since titles carry no legal
weight, that doesn't matter much anyway.) Other than that, all the
sections I've examined match exactly between 26 USC and the
Statutes at Large.

The idea that a Title which isn't "positive law" doesn't apply to
the general public is purely a fabrication. Yes, technically the
REAL law consists of the underlying public laws, found in the
Statutes at Large, but only very rarely is there a difference
between that and the United States Code anyway. A title not being
"positive law" is NOT permission to ignore it. And if Statutes at
Large are what you want, try Volume 68A, which is the 1954 tax
code. You can wade through each volume of the statutes at large if
you really want to, but personally, I'm thankful it's been compiled
in one place for me.

Sincerely,


Larken Rose
www.larkenrose.com
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