The Private Laws Archive · How to Use This Site · Relief Type & Subject Matter · Case Law · Citation · Acknowledgments
This site indexes every statute enacted as a "private law" in the Statutes at Large since the First Congress — more than 46,000 in all. Unlike public laws, private laws grant relief to a specifically named individual, group, or entity: a pension increase, a name change, a land grant, permission to sue the federal government, and similar forms of individualized relief that Congress historically handled by direct enactment rather than through general legislation or administrative process.
The text of every private law comes from GovInfo's digitized Statutes at Large. Each record links back to the official GovInfo page, where the original scanned volume is available.
Search the text of all private laws from the homepage. By default this searches titles
only; check "also search full text" to search the full text of every law, which reads
more data and is slower. The search box supports "exact phrase" matching,
multiple words combined as AND, word1 OR word2, and -exclude
to omit terms.
You can also browse without searching, filtering by time period (year range or Congress), relief type, and subject matter — either from the homepage's browse controls or from the filter sidebar once you're viewing results.
Every private law in this archive has been labeled with a relief type and one or more subject matter categories, described in full on the Methodology page.
Relief type describes the kind of benefit Congress provided, in five categories, each with several sub-types: Monetary Payments (compensation, refunds, or damages), Non-Monetary Relief from Existing Obligations (waiving or setting aside a statutory, regulatory, or judicial obligation), Granting Jurisdiction or Process (authorizing a claim to be heard by a court, tribunal, or further congressional fact-finding), Granting Property Rights (conveying real property, personal property, patents, or copyrights), and Other Administrative Action (chartering institutions, recognizing divorces or name changes, and similar recognition of federal service).
Subject matter categorizes what a private law is about, independent of the relief it grants — using the same 21 policy-area categories as the Comparative Agendas Project topic codebook (e.g. Immigration, Defense, Health).
Where a federal court opinion cites a private law in this archive, that link appears directly on the law's record. All such opinions can also be searched and filtered from the Case Law page, independent of the private law they cite.
Add the preferred citation for this dataset here (e.g. a DOI once the underlying data is archived with a repository).
Add acknowledgments here — project leadership, research assistance, and funding sources.