  The United States Code (Code) is a document containing over 22 million words
that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars
and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in
various aspects of the Code. However, few have mathematically formalized the
notions behind these discussions or directly measured the resulting
representations. This paper addresses the current state of the literature in
two ways. First, we formalize a representation of the United States Code as the
union of a hierarchical network and a citation network over vertices containing
the language of the Code. This representation reflects the fact that the Code
is a hierarchically organized document containing language and explicit
citations between provisions. Second, we use this formalization to measure
aspects of the Code as codified in October 2008, November 2009, and March 2010.
These measurements allow for a characterization of the actual changes in the
Code over time. Our findings indicate that in the recent past, the Code has
grown in its amount of structure, interdependence, and language.
