So what else should you be aware of with regard to legislative research? Well, one thing is how to research very new legislation as well as legislation that is still pending. What you need to know about this in a nutshell is that:
Statutes are published in three phases:
1. The first phase is the Slip law – which are the newly enacted statutes.
These are available on: legislature websites. It's not so much a thing at the state level so you'll rarely be asked about state slip laws but just in case you can check out the State legislature websites by looking them up via google as I discussed earlier for example the SC government site.
2. The second phase and another term you'll here is the session law phase.
This includes all of the statutes passed by a single session of legislature arranged by date. Published as a bound volume for the legislative term. And they can be found in print or on the same websites we discussed above for the slip laws.
3. And the final stage is the addition of the new law to the statutory code - the US code which we started off our discussion talking about earlier in this lesson.
If you wanted to track a bill that has been proposed but not yet enacted, there are several websites which provide news and alerts for pending laws so you can easily follow that at any of these.
Here's an example of a new bill that has been proposed in the House called the Disease X Act of 2023 which discusses the development of technology for medical countermeasures against viruses and potential pandemics. Here we can see the bill on the congress.gov website and also on Proquest Congressional which is a commercial website that displays at the top the stage the bill is in on its journey to become a law.
I don't know how any of you grew up with Schoolhouse Rock and remember the "I'm just a Bill" song, but it comes to mind every time I look up bills and learn more about them. As you can see, it's currently in the House, it has yet to go to the Senate, be approved by the President and then hopefully one day become a law.
Congress.gov
Proquest Congressional