Legal Research for Beginners

Now that we've talked about researching very new and even pending legislation, let's turn our attention to how to research the history of a law and why we would want to do this.

• Conducting Legislative History Research consists of determining the meaning of the statutory language included in the law, as well as discovering the essential intention or purpose that was the original goal of the lawmakers when making the law as well as tracking the progress of a bill or a proposed law by researching all of the documents produced within the legislative process.  And there can be many!
• There is criticism in the legal field of doing this type of legislative history research by those who believe that the meaning and intent of a statute should be determined by the statute and its language alone and not be re-interpreted by analyzing foundational documents such as hearing transcripts or debates on the floor of congress, etc.

But regardless of this criticism, legislative history research is a very common thing.  So let's talk about what's involved so that you're prepared:

Main documents important for legislative history research

• Bills – major source of text of pending statute.
• Committee Reports – Considered the most important source for discovering legislative intent, these documents analyze bills and their purpose and often include its legislative history. They describe the bill and give the committee’s reasons for recommending it to the floor. Published in the Serial Set for that session of Congress.
• Floor debates – Debates in the House and Senate about the bill. May contain the bill’s sponsor’s interpretation of the proposed statute.
• Hearings – Contain the transcripts of testimony about the bill.

These are the main documents involved in passing legislation however there can be others as well.

So where can you go to start finding all of these different documents when conducting legislative history reserach?

Well you can go to the primary source on free websites such as congress.gov and govinfo, CRS - Congressional Research Service - reports, and there are paid services such as  Proquest Congressional which have most of the legislative documents, and then there are print sources such as USCCAN which are Printed committee reports for most statutes, these are also available on major platforms such as Westlaw and Lexis.

Compiled Legislative Histories

And then there are sources which have done the legwork for you.  There are many laws which have already had legislative histories compiled for them containing all of the documents included in the legislative process.

• Proquest's Legislative Insight offers compiled legislative histories covering more than 28,000 laws dating back to 1789. PDFs of bills, reports, hearings, debates, and other documents across terms of Congress.
• HeinOnline US Federal Legislative History Library  has PDFs of documents pertaining to more than 2,000 laws.

The Librarians' Society of Washington DC (LLSDC) has put together massive lists of compiled legislative histories and the laws they pertain to.  The first list indexes all of the legislative histories that can be found on commercial websites and the second contains only those available on free outlets such as HathiTrust.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the LLSDC lists of commercial and free sources, you can see the laws listed begin with PL which stands for Public Law.

Librarians' Society of Washington DC (LLSDC): https://www.llsdc.org/

Here are over 12,000 legislative histories provided through Proquest Congressional and on the right just one legislative history, you can see all of the different related documents provided.

Proquest Congressional - https://congressional.proquest.com/help/congressional/leghistpt_cpt.html