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Compiling Federal Legislative Histories

 

    When possible, courts interpret statutes based on the plain meaning of the law. However, when the plain meaning of the law is ambiguous, a court tries to determine what the legislature intended in writing the statute. In this case researching the legislative history of the law might be necessary. This requires gathering official background information and discussion leading up to a law’s enactment.
    There are a number of resources within the library that will direct you to the legislative materials collection you need to analyze. The text of most of our federal legislative materials is on microfiche. There is a handful of sites on the Internet with excellent access to legislative history materials and most commercial legal databases contain some legislative history information as well. See Online Resources below for a list of these sites.
 

Statutes at Large (full-text of public laws, with brief legislative history information)

    The Statutes at Large is a compilation of the laws that are passed during a legislative session. The laws are bound in chronological order by the date they are signed by the president (i.e. public law number). Each law shows the original bill number, the date of passage, and, for more recent laws, a reference to the cite in the United States Code. There is a brief legislative history listing conference committees, dates of consideration and passage in each house, and references to Presidential statements. In volumes published since 1975, this information is at the end of each public law; before that, such information can be found in tables at the end of each bound volume.

United States Code Congressional and Administrative News (U.S.C.C.A.N.) (full-text of public laws, selected Congressional reports and executive documents, and brief legislative history information since 1985)

    A commercial publication of the Statutes at Large, U.S.C.C.A.N. is arranged by public law number within each session of Congress.   It cites bill number; committee reports; dates of consideration and passage of bills; committee report numbers; conference committees reports, if any; and Congressional Record cites for dates of consideration and passage of bills. The legislative history volumes publish reports for major legislation for each Congress. However, they do not summarize report and bill information of earlier congresses.

Congressional Information Service (C.I.S.) (citations only)

    C.I.S. has comprehensive access to traditional Congressional publications.  There is an Index volume arranged by subject, name, title and bill number and an Abstract volume Arranged by Congressional Committee for each year.  Up until 1984 legislative history materials were included in brief in the Abstract volume.  After 1984 the publication expanded to include a Legislative History volume.  Arranged by public law number, there are cites for bills, committee reports, committee prints, hearings, debates, and executive documents, including references to materials from prior sessions and related bills that might be pertinent. To retrieve the full text of these documents, refer to the microfilm collection or one of the Online Resources listed below.

Congressional Record (full-text, current year in print; previous years in microfiche)

    This is a daily publication of the transcript of debates and proceedings of Congress. If you have a date for the Congressional Record but no page number, check the Daily Digest in the back of each issue. It has helpful tables, such as “History of Bills Enacted into Public Law.” The index is cumulated every two weeks, indexed by subject, name of legislator, title, and references to bill numbers. It gives a chronological record of the activity of the bill. Senate bills are recorded in the Congressional Record at the time of introduction, along with the bill’s title, sponsor, and committee having jurisdiction. All Senate amendments to bills and some House amendments to bills are printed in the Congressional Record.   Look for the “History of Bills and Resolutions” table published in the Index.  We have the current year in our Government Documents collection and a historic collection of microfiche.  The Congressional Record is also available on all of the Online Resources listed below.

 

Online Resources

There are a number of Internet sites from which to access current and selected historical government documents:
 

GPO ACCESS (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/) has bill texts, committee reports, the Congressional Record, and Congressional documents.
 

THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov) has bill texts and summaries, public laws, major legislation, committee reports, and the Congressional Record and links to committee home pages since 1995.  Thomas has legislative history summaries since 1973 and some selected older materials.  This is an excellent free source for legislative materials.
 

Commercial Databases

If you have access to Westlaw and Lexis, each of these commercial sources have a number of legislative databases.  The most useful are covered below.
 

WESTLAW To search most effectively on Westlaw, review the scope of the following database before entering your search terms.  They have supplied some useful tips.
LH (Legislative History)	This database has Congressional committee reports of Congressional bills and public laws, and executive documents from 1948-1989 that are published in U.S.C.C.A.N.  As of 1990, they have all Congressional committee reports, including bills not enacted.
CR	Congressional Record, 1985-
US-PL	Public laws for the current session
US-PL-OLD	Public laws for previous sessions
CONG-BILLTXT	Text of bills in the current session, along with the legislative history of select major pieces of legislation.
US-BILLTRK	Summaries of status of current federal legislation
BILLTRK-OLD	Archived bills since 1991
USTESTIMONY	Congressional hearings, 1993-

 

LEXIS For searching the Lexis database for legislative history materials, select the following topics: Federal Legal-U.S.-Legislative Histories and Materials
Bill tracking	Follows the bills from current Congress from their introduction through the hearings, mark-ups, floor vote, and presidential signature process
Congressional full text bills	Supplies all bills and resolutions and their updates for the current session.  It also lists areas anticipated to be impacted and the changes to the bill since its introduction.
Committee prints	1994-2005
Committee reports	1990-
Congressional Record	1985-
House and Senate Documents	1995-
Congressional bills legislative forecast	Current and historical back to 1985. Steps of each bill, odds of passing, used for historical trends.

U.S. SERIAL SET

A product of LexisNexis’ Academic product, the Serial Set has a wide collection of Congressional documents.  Most legislative resources in this collection date back to the early 1800s, including committee prints, hearings, House and Senate documents, Congressional journals, executive documents, treaties, and selected legislative histories.  It is searchable by subject and by document number.  This is a good alternative to the microfiche collection housed in most libraries.  For University of Wyoming students, this database is available from the UW Libraries’ web site.

 

Compiled Legislative Histories

    Some extensive compilations on a single legislative act are published as treatises. Check the online catalog both for our collection and the main library. Occasionally, these sources are mentioned in the annotations of USCA. Or your public law may be treated in an already existing bibliography of legislative history materials, such as: 
 

Nancy P. Johnson, Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories: A Bibliography of Government Documents, Periodical Articles, and Books 1st Congress-94th Congress (1979). KF 42.2 .L5 1979-1983 
 

Bernard D. Reams, Federal Legislative Histories: An Annotated Bibliography and Index to Officially Published Sources (1994). Reference KF 42.2 .R4 1994

 

Other Useful Resources

Westlaw and Lexis have entire databases for some large federal legislative subjects like tax, environment, and bankruptcy that are searchable by keyword. Search their directories for available topics.

For a comprehensive discussion of the legislative process and rules of statutory interpretation, see: Norman J. Singer, Statutes and Statutory Construction, (6th ed. 2000). KF 425 .S56 2000

For review, let’s consider the process of a bill becoming a law:

Process of Legislation
Introduction of bill or resolution by a legislator	Bills are introduced into one or both houses of Congress by their sponsor. If a bill is not passed before the session of Congress ends, it dies. It will have to be reintroduced for another chance to become law.
Assignment of a unique bill number	Bills are numbered sequentially. H.R. for House bills and S. for Senate bills; H.J. Res. and S.J. Res. for joint resolutions. For bills introduced in both houses, two numbers are assigned.
Referred to committee or subcommittee	Committee considers whether to recommend passage; if not, the bill dies. Committee Reports are generally considered one of the most useful document in a legislative history.  They include the purpose and scope of the legislation, reasons for enactment, section-by-section analysis, a discussion of changes which will occur to existing laws, amendments proposed and adopted to original proposal, and executive documents. In Hearings, witnesses give prepared statements and answer questions of the committee members.  Hearings may include exhibits of interested parties and the text of the bill.  Hearings are not held on all legislation or may have been heard during a previous session of Congress. Hearings are generally less important than committee reports.  If the bill is recommended, a Committee Report is produced. Committee prints are background information, statistics, historical, scientific or social data on specific subjects prepared for use of the committee members.
Subcommittee reports to full committee; Committee reports to full legislative body	Floor debates are discussion from the floor of Congress when the bill is out of committee. Floor debates are not weighted very heavily as persuasive material. Sponsors and committee members may correct misleading statements from the floor. Suggested amendments that may not have been previously considered in committee may appear here for the first time as well as additional discussion for and against the proposed legislation.
Referred to conference committee	If a bill is passed by both houses in significantly different versions, it is referred to a Conference Committee. Conference committee reports are produced when both houses pass a bill but can’t agree on some issues. This report reconciles the differences between the two bills and gives a statement explaining the effect of the actions.
President signs or vetoes	When the President signs a bill into law or vetoes a bill, he frequently makes comments about the law itself. These statements are published as Executive Documents or Presidential Signing Statements.
Assigned a public law number	Results in slip law or public law. These are published in consecutive order in the Statutes at Large.

 

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Suggested Search Strategy
Steps to developing a legislative history	Resource/ Finding Aids	Location
Find the public law number, bill number, and year of passage.   This should give you access to the law and all amendments. The bill number and public law number will be your most useful tools in formulating a legislative history as most sources are organized by either one or the other.	United States Code Service or United States Code Annotated  Citations to public laws appear at the end of the statute along with a brief list of enacted legislated changes.   The text of the public law can be found in Statutes at Large and U.S.C.C.A.N., both of which have a short legislative history at the end of the law that gives the bill number, and dates of consideration and passage.	Reference M-C-6 through M-C-8           S-W-13 M-N-2
Find the CIS Legislative History volume for that year to identify cites to legislative materials that you might need to review.	CIS Legislative History volumes give a comprehensive list of the documents compiled during the legislative process (remember this is not a full-text source).  The material is broken down into reports, bills, debates, hearings, and miscellaneous (executive documents, committee prints).  If one of these elements is missing, it probably does not exist for this piece of legislation.  (These materials are also treated separately below for additional sources.)  You will be looking for cites with prefixes Y1 (bills, resolutions and reports) and Y4 (hearings), for example Y1.1/8:104-295 and Y4.AG8/1:104-7. If your bill is pending, use online sources for bill tracking or contact the sponsor or committee directly. If your piece of legislation is after 1995, try going directly to one of the online resources. Another source for older bills is Eugene Nabor’s Legislative Reference Checklist: the Key to Legislative Histories from 1789-1903 (Rothman, 1982) The Congressional Record table “History of Bills and Resolutions” goes back to the 19th century.	M-C-9 (cancelled in 2001)                                     http://thomas.loc.gov/ http://www.gpoaccess.gov       KF 49 .L43 1982     Our holdings begin in 1977.  The main library's collection begins with 1789.
Find the text of these materials.	The microfiche materials are arranged by Congress. We have microfiche sets going back to the 99th Congress, 1986.  U.S.C.C.A.N., in addition to printing the full text of the public laws, also published some selected reports and executive documents in its legislative history volumes for each Congress.  You will still need to follow up with CIS and the microfiche to get a comprehensive picture. For legislation enacted after 1995, see online sources.	Microfiche cabinets (labeled by Congress)     M-N-2             http://thomas.loc.gov/ http://www.gpoaccess.gov/
Debates	CIS Legislative History volumes list debates with dates and cites to the Congressional Record. (Remember, we have only the current year in paper.)  Older years are in microfiche   Congressional Record is available online after 1995.	M-C-9   S-W-14 Microfiche cabinets (labeled Congressional Record)   http://thomas.loc.gov
Executive documents	Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 1966-2001.  Older issues and papers since 2001 are republished in: Public Papers of the President. Can also be found in Federal Register, if you have the date, and in title 3 of the Code of Federal Regulations.    Also, some selected executive documents are republished in U.S.C.C.A.N.	S-W-17     S-W-17   Current year M-N-2; Older issues beginning S-E-10; online at http://www.gpoaccess.gov     M-N-2
Committee reports and Hearings	Some are published individually as pamphlets and catalogued as part of the collection.  Check our online catalog, as well as Coe Library’s holdings. Available online.	Paper S-S-26; microfiche       http://thomas.loc.gov http://www.gpoaccess.gov
Conference Committee Reports	Also published in the Congressional Record	S-W-14 and microfiche cabinets.

 

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