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Introduction

Policies regarding subject access to materials about specific legislative enactments have evolved over the years. Prior to 1995, the Library of Congress restricted the use of uniform titles of laws for subject access to legislative histories and textual criticisms of laws (usually as a 610 author-title heading, with the author being the jurisdiction and the title being the uniform title for the law). Material about a specific law could not be retrieved by the name of the law unless the presence of the text of the statute resulted in a 110/710 author-title heading for the statute. In a card catalog, author and subject headings were usually interfiled, so a card for a 110/710 heading was for the most part just as good as a 610 heading. This is often not the case in a modern OPAC that makes a clearer distinction between author and subject headings without consulting the user. As discussed below, Anglo-American statutes tend to change limited aspects of preexisting law, so that except for a legislative history a topical heading is probably more relevant than a heading for a single statute.

Following lobbying by AALL, LC changed this policy in 1995 to allow assignment of an author-title subject heading for a work on a specific law if it is "judged to be a useful access point." The current policy is stated in Subject Cataloging Manual H1715. The heading for a statute (usually a jurisdiction as author combined with a uniform title) may be assigned as a subject heading to works about the individual act. As before, headings for individual laws, with the subdivision for legislative histories, are mandated for legislative histories. Due to the rule that the first subject heading needs to "support" the classification number in LCC, one can conclude that first subject heading should be the 610 for the law if the book is classified in a specific number-cutter for the statute, though H1715 also says not to make a 610 heading if the book consists exclusively of the unannotated statute (perhaps because of redundancy since in that case the author-title heading for the statute will be the main entry.) [...continued]