The
Legislative Histories site to non-commercial and to commercial legislative histories is jointly sponsored by the Society's Federal Law Libraries Special Interest Section and Legislative Research Special Interest Section. Many of the non-commercial histories come from Federal agency libraries with special thanks to the Department of Commerce Law Library. It is hoped that other agencies and firms will add their collections to it in the future. Commercial legislative histories listed are from Westlaw, LexisNexis and HeinOnline.
Federal legislative histories are generally considered compilations of related documents to a specific U.S. public law that precede the law's enactment and that is how the term is used here. The chronology of the bill's (or bills') development is normally set out as well, including related legislation in previous Congresses. Legislative histories assist Federal agencies and the courts to interpret the Congressional intent of various Federal laws or a law's provisions. The listings above are to individual laws in both alphabetical and public law number order with non-commercial histories, having more detailed identifiers, listed first. The term "legislative history" is also, at times, given to related Congressional documents of both the original act and its subsequent amendments or to special collections of related documents on a particular topic like tax law or environmental law. These special collections are listed at the conclusion of the above lists. Finally, the term "legislative history" is sometimes given to mere descriptions of the historical development and perhaps the content of the original law and its amendments. However, the lists above only include histories with compiled Congressional documents related to a law and do not include those that only describe the history of a law.
Legislative history construction is a craft and relevant documents may not always be included, and sometimes, of course, not all of the documents to a history are available. Usually a legislative history includes the related public law, standing committee and conference reports, debates/discussion from the Congressional Record, various proposed bills in different versions, committee hearings, and perhaps a presidential signing statement, but more documents from different agencies and earlier congresses could be included as well. See Practitioner's Guide.
For Department of Commerce (DoC) legislative histories the pin number or word to the catalog is what you make it, however, your Adobe Reader software must be at least version 6.0 or higher in order to view the PDF documents contained therein. The Pop-up blocker function on your browser should also be turned off.
Federal Reserve Board (FRB) legislative histories are generally downloaded to an LLSDC site. Other legislative histories listed can be found on the Internet.
Library of Congress (LoC) bill histories, or list of actions, and bill summaries are prepared by its Congressional Research Service and made available from 1973 (93rd Congress) to the present through THOMAS, the Library's legislative database. Senate bill numbers begin with an "S." and House of Representatives bill numbers begin with an "H.R." From 1989 (101st Congress) to the present the text of bills and resolutions are available on THOMAS and linked to each of its bill status/summary reports. From 1995 (104th Congress) forward committee reports are linked to the those reports and from 1999 (106th Congress) forward Congressional Record pages are also linked to the list of actions on each bill report. Currently, congressional hearings and Presidential signing statements are about the only legislative history documents not linked to THOMAS bill reports.
The legislative histories in PDF on Heinonline.org come from a variety of sources including those previously published in paper by the William S. Hein Company, Inc. and by the U.S. Government Printing Office. However's Hein's collection is largely growing through the digitization of the legislative histories compiled in paper by the certain law firms. Note that the list of histories on Heinonline is in alphabetical order, but frequently the titles are not those of the popular title to the public law, but rather the title of the book or compilation such as the "Legislative History of the Toxic Substances Control Act" or "Kaminstein Legislative History Project on the Copyright Act of 1976." However, the related links to HeinOnline are direct links to each history but may require an initial username and password. Searching for certain words or phrases in a specific history may require accessing various volumes or parts to the history and there is also a "Search this Title" tool to search specific or multiple legislative history titles. Besides its Legislative History Library, Heinonline also has dozens of
legislative histories in its new "Taxation & Economic Reform in
America" Library, particularly those related taxation, banking, and
securities law and these have now been linked as well. In addition, Heinonline's Legislative History Library has online the publication, "Sources of Complied Legislative Histories" by Nancy Johnson.
LexisNexis legislative histories have complete word-search capabilities as well as navigational markers to pull up individual documents. Although the database has only about 15 specific U.S. public law legislative histories that are searchable in this manner (largely environmental laws) there are a few combined collections (bankruptcy, tax and appropriations) as well as CIS abstracts of all legislative histories going back to 1989 with links to bill track chronologies, committee reports, Congressional Record pages, bill texts, and abstracts to Congressional hearings. Lexis also has word-search capabilities in the those databases as well as the complete U.S. Statutes at Large in PDF. Lexis is accessible by subscription or credit card. See Lexis.com - Legal - Federal Legal - Legislative Histories & Materials.
Until recently most of
Westlaw's comprehensive legislative histories of specific U.S. laws (some 31) have come largely from the law firm of Arnold and Porter. They are all word-searchable using Westlaw's search software. However, since 2007 Westlaw has been digitizing into PDF the more than 25,000 legislative histories compiled by the Government Accountability Office Library (see
GAO letter regarding contract per FOIA request) and now has some 15,000 completed primarily from the 84th through 103rd Congresses. This is a premium Westlaw database file (
FED-LH) and each PDF document accessed entails an additional charge. Besides a template for specific laws and documents the database is capable of performing a global word or phrase search of all histories in the FED-LH file (after deactivating Preference - Document Display - Display Result List when search completes) so that within each resultant list of documents within a legislative history (Cong. Rec. pages, reports, bills, hearings) the documents containing the typed in search words are highlighted. There is no way to search for specific words in a single legislative history. Plus many laws are absent from the chronological collection and many documents (like reports) are missing from the individual histories. In addition to the FED-LH file, Westlaw's standard legislative history file (LH) has committee reports and joint explanatory statements from 1948 and all committee reports from 1970. Also
Westlaw has a legislative history template to public laws that gathers related documents it has just by entering the public law number. And finally Westlaw has a number of collected legislative histories on specialized topics. Westlaw is accessible by subscription or credit card. See Westlaw.com - Directory - U.S. Federal Materials - Legislative History.
Public law numbers that uniquely identify a U.S. law have been assigned to U.S. statutes since 1908. The first number identifies the two year Congress and the second number is chronologically assigned to laws as they are enacted. However, it was not until 1957 that public law numbers were officially used for citation purposes. Before that time chapter numbers, for each congressional session, had been assigned to both public and private laws with a "statute" containing all the chapters in a particular congressional session. Thus many laws might have the same chapter number, even within the same congress. From 1995 to the present the text of public laws are available in PDF on
GPO Access.
The date of a public law is the day that the President signs it into law or the date when both congressional chambers overide his veto. It is also the laws's effective date unless provisions within the law indicate otherwise.
The
U.S. Statutes At Large contains all the public and private laws of the United States enacted by Congress since 1789. The first number of a statute citation identifies the volume number of the U.S. Statutes at Large (currently a volume number is assigned to each congressional session) followed by the beginning page number for a particular law (or title or section within a law). See
U.S. Statutes At Large: Documents and Information Included The United States Code (USC) is an updated subject arrangement of all general and permanent laws of United States still in force. It does not include annual appropriations, name changes on public buildings, repealed laws, and other local or non-permament matters. The USC was originally enacted in 1926 as "prima facie" evidence of the law, not positive law. On the face of it, the U.S. Code is the law of that land, but it is rebuttable by the presentation of prior statutes at variance with it. However, over time about half the 50 titles of the U.S. Code have been enacted into positive law while repealing related prior laws. The first number in a USC citation is the title and the second number is generally the section number. Provisions of public laws assigned as notes to sections in the USC also have the force of law as do statutory provisions omitted as unnecessary from the Code, but not repealed. See United States Code: Historical Outline and Explanatory Notes.
The Office of the Law Revision Counsel in the U.S. House Representatives is empowered to assign Code cites to new statutory provisions, to prepare the official U.S. Code for publication, and to prepare non-positive law titles of the U.S. Code for enactment (2 USC § 285 et. seq.). The links to the USC on this page are to those presented by the Legal Information Institute of the Cornell Law School, which obtains its data in various releases from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. However, regardless of the release date, all information is updated in January of each year and it is generally one and one half to three years behind the current date. To check if a provision has changed see the U.S. Code Classification Tables published on the Web by the Office. Generally, only the primary U.S. Code cite of a particular law is listed for each of the above laws.
Links to the current Code of Federal Regualtions (CFR) is to the unofficial Beta site (e-CFR) on GPO Access, not to its annual CFR site. Agency regulations, promulgated pursuant to law, are first published in the Federal Register in proposed or final form where they are accompanied by explanations in the preamble. The matter in the CFR is just the finalized text of the regulations. The first number of a CFR cite is to the title and the second is to the CFR part. As with USC cites usually only one primary CFR cite is listed with the above public laws. See: A Research Guide to the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations.
Maintained by Rick McKinney (rick.mckinney@frb.gov), Assistant Law Librarian, Federal Reserve Board Law Library. Last updated on February 28, 2010.
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