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List of United States federal legislation

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This is a long and comprehensive list of Acts of Congress even including those during the Articles of Confederation. It is not complete, but it will grow and evolve over time. It needs some work, but it already has a lot of useful information in it. Please give it a fair review. —Markles 14:01, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

While we may quibble about the definition of major legislation, I think this article is a very impressive piece of work and deserves recognition. It's also a great starting point for branching off to more comprehensive lists for each Congressional session.
  • Support Hmains 00:14, 24 September 2006 (UTC) However, this article is already 65K bytes in size when edited and can only grow larger. How could the list be split into 2 or 3 articles or subarticles, now or in the future? Perhaps a 1801-1900 sub article and a 1901-2000 sub article with the possibility of later breaking at 50 year intervals if any 100 year article itself gets too large.[reply]
    Comment: I agree the article will need to be split into a series of lists by date at some point. Given the size, I feel sooner rather than would be best. Tompw 21:50, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment: I reluctantly concur about splitting. I would really like to have one list because it just makes it easier to find things. But it is getting pretty big. I think splitting should wait at least until the Featured status is resolved and then for some time afterwards (if approved).—Markles 22:19, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Actually, some time ago I added quite a few entries to the list to make sure it captured every piece of legislation identified in Brian K. Landsberg (ed), Major Acts of Congress, ISBN: 0028657497. My understanding is that the book is authoritative in the field. bd2412 T 14:21, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Great - please would you add that as a reference, and add a sentence explaining the selection in the lead section. Does this list contain many extra ones, on top of the "Major Acts" listed by Landsberg? How were they selected? Is is really the case that there were 18 "major" acts in 2003/4 and 14 so far in 2005/6, but only 17 in the 50 years from 1811 to 1861 (including 13 Congresses that seem to have done nothing of any importance at all)? This is an important list, and there seems to be some progress in sorting out these problems, but the selection criterion and proper referencing are important enough for me to object until they are sorted out. -- ALoan (Talk) 15:36, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Acts contained within the article exceed those in the book. First, some Acts not appearing in the book already had articles. Second, the book seemed to me to be weighted towards older legislation, while Wikipedia in general is better with more recent events. Third, the book was published in 2003, and has missed developments since. bd2412 T 01:27, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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