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Map showing the source languages/language families of state names. The fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the five inhabited U.S. territories, and the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands have taken their names from a wide variety of languages. The names of 24 states derive from indigenous languages of the Americas and one from Hawaiian.
Northwest Territory of the United States, 1787 This 1856 map shows slave states (gray), free states (pink), U.S. territories (green), and Kansas in center (white).. In United States law, an organic act is an act of the United States Congress that establishes a territory of the United States and specifies how it is to be governed, [1] or an agency to manage certain federal lands.
Transmission to second house. A bill that is passed in one house is transmitted, along with a formal message, to the other house. If the bill is not reported from committee or is not considered by the full house, the bill is defeated. The house of origin, upon return of its amended bill, may take any one of several courses of action.
Congress Voting Independence, by Robert Edge Pine, depicts the Second Continental Congress voting in 1776.. Although one can trace the history of the Congress of the United States to the First Continental Congress, which met in the autumn of 1774, [2] the true antecedent of the United States Congress was convened on May 10, 1775, with twelve colonies in attendance.
At the federal level of government in the United States, laws are made almost exclusively by legislation. Such legislation originates as an Act of Congress passed by the United States Congress; such acts were either signed into law by the president or passed by Congress after a presidential veto. So, legislation is not the only source of ...
The Guarantee Clause of Article 4 of the Constitution states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." These two provisions indicate states did not surrender their wide latitude to adopt a constitution, the fundamental documents of state law, when the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
The law of most of the states is based on the common law of England; the notable exception is Louisiana, whose civil law is largely based upon French and Spanish law.The passage of time has led to state courts and legislatures expanding, overruling, or modifying the common law; as a result, the laws of any given state invariably differ from the laws of its sister states.
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress. Senators have been directly elected by state-wide popular vote since the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1913. A senate term is six years with no term limit. Every two years a third of the seats are up for election.