Product · /v1/law/lookup?corpus=guidelines
The Guidelines Manual as it read at the sentencing.
416 guidelines from the United States Sentencing Commission, one row per guideline section, carried as dated editions back to 2016-11-01 and forward to ussg-2025. A federal court must calculate the guideline range, and the range depends on which November's manual applies — so the manual has to be a timeline, not a current-text lookup.
The same guideline, the same call, one parameter apart:
(b) Specific Offense Characteristics (1) If the loss exceeded $6,500, increase the offense level as follows… (I) More than $1,500,000 add 16 (J) More than $3,500,000 add 18 (K) More than $9,500,000 add 20
- citation.display
- U.S.S.G. §2B1.1
- status
- active
- validFrom → validTo
- 2025-11-01 → present
- temporalBasis
- act-effective-date
- provenance.versionLabel
- ussg-2025
- provenance.sourceSystem
- ussc.gov
- provenance.contentHash
- 278af20c07b5476d363ed8a2168a2dc0f8067c588a3d5dcc83d5599208cbe65b
(2) (Apply the greatest) If the offense— (A) (i) involved 10 or more victims; (ii) was committed through mass-marketing; or (iii) resulted in substantial financial hardship to one or more victims, increase by 2 levels; (B) resulted in substantial financial hardship to five or more victims, increase by 4 levels…
- citation.display
- U.S.S.G. §2B1.1
- status
- active
- validFrom → validTo
- 2018-11-01 → 2023-11-01
- temporalBasis
- act-effective-date
- provenance.versionLabel
- ussg-2018
- provenance.sourceSystem
- ussc.gov
- provenance.contentHash
- 8124372bbc13f61c5932828b20043445d238d3ffbf53b18a5d60e91cf32ed36c
Same citation, same call, one added parameter — and a different edition, a different hash, and a closed validity window. That is the whole product in one diff.
check this record →Not guidance
The Guidelines sit in a corpus of their own rather than under agency guidance, because they are not sub-regulatory. A court must calculate the range, and an answer that carried the “not binding law” disclaimer would be telling a sentencing lawyer something false.
Commentary stays with the guideline
Application notes and background are in the body, not split into rows of their own. They are authoritative under Stinson, they are cited into the section (“§3E1.1 cmt. n.1”), and the Notes to Table that qualify §2B1.1(b)(1)'s loss figures are printed inside the table's own commentary. Answering with the subsections alone would be wrong in the way that costs a hearing.
One edition per November 1
Editions are labelled ussg-<year> and take effect on that year's November 1 — temporalBasis: act-effective-date, because that date is the Commission's own, not ours. The amendment chronology is split into historyNote and excluded from the content hash, so a reprinting that only adds an amendment line does not read as a text change.
Keys
Cite it the way the manual prints it.
- ussg-2b1.1
- U.S.S.G. §2B1.1
- ussg-3e1.1
- U.S.S.G. §3E1.1
- ussg-ch5-pt-a
- U.S.S.G. Ch. 5, Pt. A — the Sentencing Table
- ussg-ch3-pt-d-concluding
- U.S.S.G. Ch. 3, Pt. D (Concluding Commentary)
- ussg-app-a
- U.S.S.G. App. A — the statutory index
A part's own introductory commentary and the concluding commentary to a part get rows, because they are cited and because a lookup that could not reach them would send a reader to a PDF.
- citation.display
- U.S.S.G. §5K2.0
- catchline
- [Deleted]
- status
- repealed
- provenance.versionLabel
- ussg-2025
A deleted guideline is served as repealed, with its history, rather than 404'd. An agent that cannot tell "gone" from "never existed" will guess, and guessing is the failure mode this API is built against.
check this record →Guidelines
416
Section-editions
1,025
Last read
2026-09-20
The Commission amends on a statutory clock — amendments take effect November 1 unless Congress acts — so the corpus re-reads monthly and the November edition lands on its own schedule rather than ours. The counts above are read from /v1/law/coverage on this render. A guideline that never changed between two editions has one version spanning both, which is why section-editions is not simply guidelines times editions.