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 hierarchy. The United States Code, a summary of Congressional legislation applying to the activities of the Federal Government, lists the major areas and territories that must be covered by the various Federal censuses:

Other titles of the United States Code contain provisions that specify the use of the Census Bureau’s statistics tabulated by geographic area for various Federal Government programs. Such geographic entities usually are governmental units, but some are statistical entities.

Court decisions directly affect Census Bureau geography as well. In the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court required that both Federal congressional districts and State legislative districts within each State be of nearly equal population size. The ability of public officials to achieve uniformity in the sizes of their legislative districts stems in part from the Census Bureau’s ability to provide them with population counts for small geographic areas.

In 1975, Congress passed Public Law 94-171, which specified the following amendment to Section 141 of Title 13:

The Census Bureau met the challenge by giving special attention to the small-area geographic framework for the 1980 census and by working with Notes and References Geographic Overview2-17