Incorporation by reference
inclusion of one document into another in a legal context
In law, incorporation by reference is the act of including a second document within another document by only mentioning the second document. This act, if completed properly, makes the entire second document a part of the main document. Incorporation by reference is often found in laws, regulations, contracts, legal and regulated documentation.
Administrative law in the United States
In American administrative law, incorporation by reference is a drafting tool that enables federal agencies to give legal effect to materials that are already published elsewhere. This is allowed under a provision of the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(1). Section 552(a) requires agencies to publish regulations in the Federal Register in order to enforce them. Section 552(a)(1) provides that if material published elsewhere is "reasonably available to the class of persons affected" and the Director of the Federal Register approves its incorporation by reference, that material will be "deemed published" in the Federal Register. It is most controversially used to incorporate privately authored voluntary consensus standards into health and safety regulations without infringing the standards developers' copyright. Federal law and policy, embodied in the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995 and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-119, requires federal agencies to use these standards instead of creating "government-unique" technical standards purely to serve regulatory purposes.
Contracts
Commercial contracts may refer to separate documents which are incorporated into the primary contract by reference to them.
The public source identifies “Incorporation by reference” as inclusion of one document into another in a legal context. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Incorporation, inclusion and document.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 9, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q11273300. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Incorporation by reference” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.