Putting a number on the total federal criminal laws created by Congress is a challenging task. There is no single place where any citizen can go to learn what is a federal crime and how many such crimes exist. A new study attempts to alleviate this problem by estimating the total number of federal crimes and measuring the growth in the federalization of crime in the United States, all done by using a text analysis algorithm that makes it possible to assess the growth of the ever-expanding federal criminal code.
