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Cannon's Precedents: About

Clarence Cannon, Clerk at the Speaker's Table of the U.S. House of Representatives, compiled the precedents of the House of Representatives, dating from 1908-1936 (60th-74th Congresses). These documents are the second half of an eleven-volume series containing selected rulings made by the Chair between 1789 and 1936. Volumes 1-5 are entitled Hinds' Precedents and were published in 1907. Cannon's Precedents entail volumes 6-11 and were published in 1936.

The precedents are numbered sequentially throughout the volumes. Each precedent appears with a headnote in bold type indicating the principle established by the precedent. The procedural exchange(s) establishing the precedent is then summarized, with the full text and citations to the Congressional Record often provided. Information about specific procedural topics can be located using the indexes (volumes 9-11), which present the headnotes of relevant precedents according to procedural topics or the detailed table of contents in each volume.

Cannon's Precedents currently consists of 130 chapters and six volumes (6-11). Three of those volumes are indexes (9-11). The following table presents the volume-to-chapter correspondence of the six volumes of Cannon's Precedents. All documents are available as ASCII text and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Volume-to-chapter correspondence of the six volumes of Cannon's Precedents.
Volume Chapter(s)
6 149-210
7 211-233
8 234-279
9 Index--Digest A through D
10 Index--Digest E through N
11 Index--Digest O through Z