LibGuides: Legislative History (federal & state): Finding Legislative Documents

Finding Legislative Documents

Senate Glossary of Legislative Terms
Find more definitions here, including Christmas Tree Bill.

This guide will help you find the following types of legislative documents:

Bills
A bill is a legislative proposal before Congress. Bills from each house are assigned a number in the order in which they are introduced, starting at the beginning of each Congress (first and second sessions).
Hearings
A hearing is a meeting of a Senate, House, joint, or special committee of Congress, usually open to the public, to obtain information and opinions on proposed legislation. In addition, hearings may also be purely exploratory in nature, providing testimony and data about topics of current interest.
Reports & Documents
Congressional reports are published by congressional committees and describe proposed legislation. They typically recommend passage of a bill.
Committee Prints
Publications issued by Congressional Committees that include topics related to their legislative or research activities, as well as other matters such as memorial tributes. They contain internal background information, and they do not have a consistent numbering system.
Debates
The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session.
Public Laws
After the President signs a bill into law, it is delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) where it is assigned a law number, legal statutory citation, and prepared for publication as a slip law. It is then published in the United States Statutes at Large.

Reading a Citation

If you have a citation

Here's a quick guide to the Bluebook abbreviations for the documents found in this guide. For detailed information, see Bluebook Rule 13. Unfamiliar with the Bluebook? See the law library's Bluebook LibGuide.

Note: Several citation forms include the abbreviated name of the chamber. S. is Senate. H.R. is the House of Representatives.

Examples:

BILL: H.R. 4173, 111th Cong. (2010)

REPORT: H.R. Rep. No. 111-517 (2010) (Conf. Rep.)

DOCUMENT: S. Doc. No. 109-19 (2006)

COMMITTEE PRINT: House Committee on Education and Labor, Picketing and Boycotts. Selected Readings, March 1 1959

DEBATE: 152 Cong. Rec. 1988 (2006)

PUBLIC LAW: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. No. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119 (2010)

Searching for Legislative History

Accessing legislative materials is no longer as difficult as it once was- many of the items you are looking for are available in a variety of sources electronically.

Determining what you will need, sifting through results, and understanding which tool to use, however, is more complicated than ever. This section of the guide will provide you with some basic guidance about how to get started, where to look for specific materials or time periods, and best practice is legislative research. This guidance is by no means exhaustive. Should you want or need more information, please be sure to check out the additional resources section on the home page of this guide.

This guide will discuss how to find legislative materials

FINDING LEGISLATIVE DOCUMENTS BY CITATION (see subpages by item type)

USING A COMPILED LEGISLATIVE HISTORY

Getting Started

The language of each Code section is based on the original act that created it and any later laws that amended it. To compile a complete legislative history for a current federal law, it is necessary to locate the documents related to both the creating act and any later amendments. To begin the process, it is helpful to locate as much as possible of the following information for each act:

its Public Law (or chapter) number [Pub. L. 110-2];
its location in the U.S. Statutes at Large [121 Stat. 5.];
the date of enactment [Feb. 2, 2007];
the number of the House or Senate bill that was enacted [110- H.R. 475].

The Public Law number and Statutes at Large citation are easily found with the text of the codified language in the official U.S. Code or the annotated unofficial versions. Each section of the Code also provides a short parenthetical note explaining how the amendments changed the existing text.

This information will help you better navigate a variety of search interfaces and research databases.

Guide to Legislative History Sources

American Memory: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation
American Memory provides access to the records and acts of Congress from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention through the 43rd Congress, 1774-1875. This is a good place to look for 18th and 19th century legislative documents as well as primary source documents from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention.
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Access to the earliest records of debates on the floor of Congress.

Historical and current legislative documents can be found in several sources. Because the amount of information available on a given piece of legislation can be voluminous, searching is not often the best place to start. It is, however, sometimes necessary to find legislative materials using traditional searching techniques.
When doing so, remember to be mindful of:

the depth of coverage of the resource: What type of materials does it collect? How far back does it reach?
the type of searching interface the resource has: What information do I need? Is there a more usable option?
the costs and access issues associated with the resources: Is the source free? Do I have access? Are their fees associated with retrieval?

Below is a quick guide to government and commercial legislative sources, along with a brief description of each. For more information about the resource hover over the blue "i" icon.

ProQuest Congressional
Provides abstracts and some full-text of bills, Committee reports, prepared testimony from hearings, and public laws, as well as legislative histories. Check out Proquest Congressionals libguides: http://proquest.libguides.com/
ProQuest's Legislative Insight
Searchable database containing legislative materials, historical context, legislative process information. Focus is on major legislative acts.
Cogress.gov
Congress.gov provides up-to-date access to many legislative documents, often with links to a PDF version. This website also provides other legislative activity, including presidential nominations, treaties, and roll call votes. Congress.gov also provides helpful summaries of the legislative process for children and adults.
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Bill summary and status information by Public Law number. Allows you to search for and retrieve a summary of all of the action taken on a bill that became a public law.
FDSys (Federal Digital System)
FDSys (the replacement for the old GPO Access) provides free, up-to-date online electronic access to a variety of information produced by the federal government, including legislative documents. It provides the official version of all publications. Coverage goes back about two decades.
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PDF versions of the most recent bills. FDSys's Congressional Record database is updated daily, except when a late adjournment delays production of the issue.

HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
Hein Online provides access to the broadest range of Congresses including public laws from 1789 to the present and the Congressional debates from 1789 to 2003. This sets it apart from American Memory, which focuses on the first century of U.S. History, and FDSys, ProQuest Congressional, and THOMAS, which all focus on the last couple of decades. PDF version of the Congressional Record Daily, as well as the Congressional Record and the publications which preceded it, thereby providing full-text PDF coverage of Congressional debates from the 1st Congress to the present.

WestlawNext
WestlawNext is a subscription service alailable to College of Law faculty and students only.
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Choose Content Type: Legislative History, select your database, such as “Legislative History,” run your search query, and then filter to the type of document you need. Or type legislative history into the main search box to select a database and then run your search query.
LexisAdvance
LexisAdvance is an online subscription product available to College of Law faculty and students only.
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Run your search query and then filter under the Legis tab to Legislative Histories and then to the type of document you need, under Source.
Michrofiche (University of Illinois library collection)
You can find the microfiche on the lower level of the Law Library. The Law Library has a microform reader that will allow you to scan your microform to PDF. Instructions for how to use the microform reader are provided next to the machine.
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You can search the catalog for mircofiche records by narrowing your results using the filters on the right-hand side. Select 'mircofiche'.
Print materials (University of Illinois library collection)
The Law Library also has volumes of legislative documents in print. Some documents are classified using Library of Congress Classification (LCC). See this guide to reading LCC call numbers. Other legislative documents are classified using the Superintendent of Documents (SuDoc) classification system.
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For more information about how to read a SuDoc number see, http://www.library.illinois.edu/doc/researchtools/guides/usfederal/sudoclist.html