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Understanding the Legislative Process
The following materials will help you review or learn about the process through which bills and resolutions become law.
- How Our Laws Are MadeOnline document provided by the Parliamentarian of the U.S. House of Representatives and now available through Congress.gov.
- The Legislative Process (videos)This nine-part series explains how a bill becomes a law from its introduction to Presidential approval.
- Glossary of Legislative TermsThe Legislative Process Glossary in Congress.gov provides assistance with the specialized vocabulary of law-making. A nine part video series illustrates each step of the law-making process.
- Federal Legislative History ResearchFor a "how to" guide on compiling legislative histories, check the website of the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C.
- Orientation to U.S. Law Research WebinarsThe Library offers recurring one-hour webinars which provide training on compiling legislative histories as well as finding/tracking statutes, case law, and regulations.
Legislative History
There are a number of sources for tracking legislative histories, including several publisher-compiled legislative history collections described below.
U.S. Federal Legislative History Collection (HeinOnline) (Opens in new window) - Begin by exploring the LibGuide (red outlined box below) which provides a key to Hein's legislative history collection and offers additional resources for finding and compiling legislative histories.
Westlaw Campus Research, (Opens in new window) the academic library version of Westlaw, is another source of both federal and state legislative histories.
Select Legislative Histories as shown above to find federal and state legislative histories. Please note that, while processes may be similar, documentation available varies widely from state to state. Selecting a state legislative history usually yields a search box where an inquiry may be entered.
State jurisdictions also offer the option to search for specific types of legislative history documents, for example, governor messages.
Special note: Students with an interest in tracking Massachusetts legislation may wish to explore MassTrac (Opens in new window) which provides information about the Commonwealth's legislative process and includes transcriptions of floor debates and voting records. The State House News Service (Opens in new window) often provides helpful supplemental coverage of legislative activity.
ProQuest Congressional (Opens in new window) indexes a broad range of Congressional and related publications, including legislative histories. The legislative history collection begins in 1969.
Proceeding directly to Advanced Search, offers the opportunity to select by content type, i.e., Legislative History, immediately. This screenshot shows a search for the legislative history of a fair pay act.
This sample legislative history (Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) shows related resources included in the ProQuest database. ProQuest is a major publisher of newspapers and journals, so related content is often included as an extra.
Congress.gov (formerly Thomas) is produced by the Library of Congress and offers a number of search tools.
The screenshot below illustrates a search for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Note the red arrow...it's pointing to "all actions" which covers individual steps in the legislative history, from bill introduction onwards.
Need more help?
Please e-mail Roxanne Palmatier, Legal Studies Librarian.