U.S. Code

The United States Code (USC) is the official compilation of federal statutory law, organized into 54 subject-matter titles. LexBuild downloads USC XML from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC) and converts it into structured Markdown files.

Download

Download USC XML files with download-usc. The command fetches XML from the OLRC download server.

Download all 54 titles:

lexbuild download-usc --all

Download specific titles:

lexbuild download-usc --titles 1
lexbuild download-usc --titles 1-5,8,11

Files are saved to ./downloads/usc/xml/ by default (e.g., usc01.xml, usc26.xml). Use -o to change the download directory:

lexbuild download-usc --all -o ./my-downloads

Release Points

The OLRC publishes the U.S. Code at specific release points that correspond to when new public laws are incorporated. By default, download-usc auto-detects the latest release point from the OLRC website.

List available release points:

lexbuild list-release-points
lexbuild list-release-points -n 5    # Show only the 5 most recent
lexbuild list-release-points -n 0    # Show all available

Pin a specific release point:

lexbuild download-usc --all --release-point 119-73not60

Convert

Convert downloaded XML files to Markdown with convert-usc.

Convert all downloaded titles:

lexbuild convert-usc --all

Convert specific titles:

lexbuild convert-usc --titles 1
lexbuild convert-usc --titles 1-5,8,11

Convert a single XML file by path:

lexbuild convert-usc ./downloads/usc/xml/usc01.xml

Granularity

Control the output file size with the -g flag:

Level	Description	Example Output
`section` (default)	One `.md` file per section	`title-01/chapter-01/section-1.md`
`chapter`	One `.md` file per chapter, sections inlined	`title-01/chapter-01.md`
`title`	One `.md` file per title, entire hierarchy inlined	`title-01.md`

lexbuild convert-usc --all -g chapter
lexbuild convert-usc --titles 26 -g title

Notes Filtering

All notes (editorial, statutory, and amendment history) are included by default. Disable them entirely or filter selectively:

# Exclude all notes
lexbuild convert-usc --all --no-include-notes

# Include only editorial notes
lexbuild convert-usc --all --include-editorial-notes

# Include only statutory notes and amendments
lexbuild convert-usc --all --include-statutory-notes --include-amendments

Dry Run

Preview what would be converted without writing any files:

lexbuild convert-usc --all --dry-run

This parses all XML and reports section counts, chapter counts, and token estimates.

Output Structure

At the default section granularity, output follows this directory structure:

output/usc/
  title-01/
    README.md
    _meta.json
    chapter-01/
      README.md
      _meta.json
      section-1.md
      section-2.md
      section-3.md
    chapter-02/
      ...
  title-02/
    ...

Each directory contains:

_meta.json — a sidecar index listing all children with identifiers and titles
README.md — a human-readable summary of that level

At chapter granularity, the chapter directories are replaced with single chapter files. At title granularity, each title is a flat title-NN.md file with no subdirectories.