BTW, my questions aren't idle. I actually deal with legal citations
from time-to-time, even if I don't totally understand them! More
importantly, I'd like for people who deal with this stuff more
seriously to feel comfortable with MODS-based applications. I'm also
trying to figure it out for a tool that translates back-and-forth
between Endnote/Reference Manager data (both of which support these
legal citations) and MODS.

        http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/

Anyway, on this:

        H.R. 24, 107th Congr. § 2 (Jan. 3, 2001)

It seems we can say most of the above goes in the "part" element.

I'm still stuck on the "107th Congress" bit though. In Endnote, there
are two fields to indicate that information: "legislative body" and
"session." I suppose in MODS we could say it is the corporate body --
something like an author -- for the relatedItem "host"? Or perhaps
it's an abbreviated title?

And Karen wrote:

> Thinking outside of the box, I could see developing a uniform title for
> bills, not unlike the uniform titles for music. Music uniform titles
> are
> faceted titles with music type, list of instruments, key, etc. in a
> proscribed order.

OK, you're losing me here in library jargon ;-)

What is a "uniform title" for those that don't know what a "faceted
title" is?

Is it just an artificial natural language identifier of sorts?

Bruce