How Many Federal Criminal Laws Are There Currently on the Books?

When federal laws were first codified in 1927, they fit into a single volume.

In 1982 the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. This effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.

In 1998, the American Bar Association performed a computer search of the federal codes looking for the words "fine" and "imprison," as well as variations. The ABA study concluded the number of crimes was by then likely higher than 3,000, but didn't give a specific estimate.

In 2003, there were around 4,000 offences that carried criminal penalties. By 2013, that number had grown by 21 percent to 4,850.

None of these studies broached the separate - and equally complex - question of crimes that stem from federal regulations, such as, for example, the rules written by a federal agency to enforce a given act of Congress. These rules can carry the force of federal criminal law. Estimates of the number of regulations range from 10,000 to 300,000 !!!  None of the legal groups who have studied the code have a firm number.

"There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime," said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. "That is not an exaggeration."