13 Finding and Using Legislative History
Legislative history research (both federal and state) is another topic that first year research and writing courses do not cover in a comprehensive way. This chapter will explain the reasons you might research legislative history, sources (documents) of legislative history, legislative process, and where to find legislative history documents.
Learning Goals
After reading this chapter, you will be able to
- Explain federal and state legislative process.
- Identify a variety of free and subscription resources to find legislative history materials.
- Locate relevant documents to determine the legislative intent or goals of enacted legislation.
- Explain the legislative history information in the context of the client scenario.
Why research legislative history?
Legislative history research might come up in the context of academic writing. However, in practice, there are a couple of common types of legislative research you might need to do: bill tracking and researching the “legislative intent” underlying a statute to help with statutory interpretation.
What is legislative history?
Legislative history is a secondary source consisting of bill versions, documents, reports, transcripts of testimony, debates, and statements that lead up to the passage of a law which is then codified as a statute. Legislative history material is produced in the framework of the legislative process.
Legislative process
Put simply, legislative process is the procedure by which a proposed law becomes a law. The process is similar in both federal and state government. Below is a general overview of the legislative process:
- A bill is proposed or introduced.
- The bill is assigned to a committee.
- If the bill is released from the committee, it goes to the chamber (i.e. House or Senate) floor for debate, amendment, or vote.
- If the bill passes that chamber, it goes to the other chamber.
- The other chamber assigns the bill to a committee and if released, goes to debate and vote.
- If the other chamber makes changes, the bill must return to the original chamber for concurrence.
- The bill will go to conference committee to resolve differences and issue a report outlining the final version.
- After the bill has been passed in identical form by both chambers of congress, it is an “enrolled” bill that goes to the President (or State Governor) for signature or veto.
Helpful resources on federal legislative process: Congressional website, Congress.gov, the White House website, whitehouse.gov, the House of Representatives website, house.gov; Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report.
Helpful resources on state legislative process: How Ideas Become Law on the Oregon Legislature’s website, Overview of California Legislative Process on the California State Association of Counties website.pdf, Overview of the Legislative Process on the Washington Legislature’s website, Legislative Process on the National Conference of State Legislatures website.
Sources of legislative history
Each step of the legislative process produces documents, which are the sources of legislative history you are looking for when you conduct research.
Federal
- Preliminary documents – before a bill is even proposed, a committee might conduct studies or hear testimony by experts resulting in committee prints, bibliographies, analysis, or reports from the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, or the Government Accountability Office;
- Bill – versions of the bill;
- Committee – Committee Reports;
- Chamber Floor – Floor debates and votes;
- Conference Committee – Conference reports;
- President – signing statement or veto statement.
State (Oregon example)
- Bill – versions of the bill;
- Committee minutes, recordings, and exhibits for committee hearings and work sessions;
- Recordings of floor proceedings and submitted testimony;
- House and Senate journals that show votes.
How do you find legislative history?
This section will explain how to find legislative sources for different types of legislative history research in the federal system and in the state system.
Bill Tracking
Bill tracking is searching for a bill that is relevant to a client’s issue and following the bill as it moves through the legislative process. You can (1) search by bill number; (2) search for a bill using search terms; and (3) search for bills affecting a statute if you have a statutory citation (some platforms).
Federal
You can track federal bills on the official congressional website, Congress.gov; the GovTrack website, govtrack.us; or Westlaw and Lexis.
Congressional Website
On Congress.gov, toward the top of the page you will find the menu entitled “Bill Searches and Lists.” Select the “Introduced” link to see a list of bills introduced in the current session, with tracking information. You also can search legislation by entering a bill number or other information in the main search bar, and then selecting the “actions” tab in the result to see the bill’s movement through Congress. You can subscribe to various types of alerts to get notifications about congressional actions.
GovTrack Website
On GovTrack, you can find bills by topic or you can select the “Search” icon to use an advanced search template to find bills by title, congressional session, sponsor, status, or chamber (House or Senate). You can select the “Get Alerts” icon to subscribe to various types of alerts for legislation and legislative actions.
Westlaw and Lexis
On Westlaw, under the “Content Types” tab, select “Proposed and Enacted Legislation” and then the “Federal” link. On the right side of the page are “Tools and Resources” including Bill Tracking, CRS (Congressional Research Service) Bill Summaries, and Historical Proposed Legislation. If you have a statute citation and you want to determine if any bills affect that statute, you will see a yellow flag icon when looking at the relevant statutory section. If you select the icon, you will see the proposed or pending legislation that affects that statute.
On Lexis, under the “Content” tab, select “Statutes and Legislation,” then “Bill Tracking.” In the “Federal” category, you will see “Bill Tracking Reports” for the current congress as well as previous congressional sessions. By selecting the “Bill Tracking Reports” link, you will be able to search by various methods including title, citation, date, and search terms. If you have a statute citation and you want to determine if any bills affect that statute, you will see a yellow triangle icon when looking at the relevant statutory section. If you select the icon, you will see the proposed or pending legislation that affects that statute.
State (Oregon example)
You can track bills by using the Oregon Legislative Information Service website, using The Oregonian bill tracking service at https://gov.oregonlive.com/bill/, or using Westlaw or Lexis.
Steps for bill tracking by bill number:
- On the Oregon Legislative Information Service (OLIS) website, first select the “Session” icon in the top right-hand corner of the page to select the current congressional session.
- Select the “Bills” icon in the top right-hand corner of the page and enter your bill number in the search box. HB signifies a House Bill. SB signifies a Senate Bill.
- The result will be a page that provides an overview of the bill, as well as tabs across the top where you can access the text of the bill, analysis, and amendments. Beneath the overview, you can access “Measure History,” a schedule of the bill’s path through the legislative process, with links to recordings of public hearings and work sessions.
The Oregonian bill tracking allows you to enter a bill number or search by terms to access a bill overview, measure text, and amendments.
Steps for bill tracking by search terms:
- On the OLIS website, select the “Session” icon and choose the current session.
- Select the “Bills” icon then choose the “Bill Text” tab and enter your search term in the search text box.
- The results of the search are bills that contain those terms. If you click on a result, you will see a bill overview.
You can use Westlaw or Lexis for bill tracking by search terms. On Westlaw, in “Content Types,” choose the “Proposed and Enacted Legislation” database. You can choose a particular state and then look at the right side of the page to find available “Tools and Resources,” such as Bill Tracking, Historical Session Laws and Bills, and Legislative History. If you choose the “Bill Tracking” resource, for example, you can enter search terms in the search bar at the top of the page to find bills containing those search terms. If you select a result, you will see a summary of the bill as well as the bill activity. On Lexis, navigate to the “State” tab and select a state. Under the “Statutes and Legislation” heading, you will see a link for “Bill Tracking Reports” which will provide a search template for multiple ways to search.
Bill tracking using an Oregon Revised Statutes citation
If you know of a statute that affects your client, but you need to research if there are any bills that will affect that statute, you can use the OLIS website, the Oregon Legislature’s website, or Westlaw and Lexis to find that information.
On the OLIS website:
- Select the “Session” icon on the top right side of the page to choose the current session.
- Select the “More” icon on the top right side of the page and then select “Reports and Documents.”
- Select “Daily and Cumulative Publications” and then select the arrow next to the “Cumulative Publications” heading.
- Select the “Statutes Affected by Measures” link.
- You can look through the table using your statutory section number to see the bill number, if any, that affects your statute.
On the Oregon Legislature’s website:
- Select the “Bills and Laws” tab.
- On the left side of the page, you will see a menu. Under the “Session Information” heading, select “Session Publications.” This will link you back to the OLIS page referenced above. Select the “Statutes Affected by Measures” link.
Lexis and Westlaw
The citator services on Lexis and Westlaw alert you to bills that affect your statutory section. On Lexis, when you are looking at a relevant statutory section, there will be a yellow triangle icon to indicate proposed or pending legislation. If you select the yellow triangle icon, you will see the bill and the other legislative tracking information. On Westlaw, a yellow flag appears next to the statutory section to indicated pending or proposed legislation. Selecting the icon will take you to the bill and other legislative information.
Legislative Intent
A common research scenario is that a statute relevant to your legal problem contains ambiguous or unclear language and you need to find information to help with statutory interpretation. If you are interpreting a statute, you would first use primary sources such as a definitions section in the statute, case law, and administrative regulations and decisions. If you cannot fully answer the ambiguity with those primary sources, you look at secondary sources such as legislative history and legal treatises. This section explains the process and sources when researching legislative history for statutory interpretation.
This type of legislative history research works backward, starting with a codified statute to find a session law chapter, then a bill, and the documents produced through the legislative process.
Federal Legislative History Research
The most important documents for statutory interpretation of a federal statute are committee reports, versions of the bill, and congressional debates.
Sources of Federal Legislative History
Committee and Conference Reports
Congressional committee reports and conference committee reports are considered to be the most important sources for statutory interpretation. Committee reports come from each of the House and Senate committees that considered the legislation. Reports provide the text of the bill, explain the purposes of the bill, and analyze the bill section by section.
Conference committees are appointed to draft a compromise bill if the House and Senate versions of the bill are different. Conference Reports are considered to be very useful because they come at the end of the legislative process and report on the compromise bill text.
Bill Versions
The introduction of a bill usually begins the legislative process. Bills are often amended several times during the legislative process so comparing versions of the bill may help with statutory interpretation based on changes or deletions of language in the law.
Congressional Debates
Congressional debates include discussions and explanations of bills and amendments. Transcripts of proceedings and debates, which are not verbatim transcripts, are published in the Congressional Record. The Congressional Record is published in a daily edition, which is published every day Congress is in session, and a bound edition, published years after the daily edition. The page numbers in the daily edition and the bound edition are different. Usually, you will cite to the bound edition if it is available. HeinOnline, in its U.S. Congressional Documents database, has a “Congressional Record Daily to Bound Locator” tool to help you convert Daily Edition citations to Bound Edition citations.
Other legislative documents
House and Senate committees hold hearings to determine the need for new legislation and hear the testimony of individuals and organizations interested in the legislation. Hearings may provide good background information on the issue the legislation is addressing but are not considered to be as important in legislative history research because they involve the views of individuals and organizations testifying rather than the views of Congress.
Research process steps
- Find the version of the law when the language at issue was introduced. Sometimes laws are amended several times, so the version in which the relevant language was introduced is most likely to have legislative history materials helpful for interpretation.
- From the statutory section, scroll to the end of the section to find a parenthetical or source note that provides citations to the slip law or laws that are the source of the statute in its current form. The following is an example of a parenthetical or source note: (Pub. L. 111–353, title III, § 306(b), Jan. 4, 2011, 124 Stat. 3959).
- You will use the slip law number (Pub.L. 111-353) to find the bill. The 111 refers to the Congressional session, and the 353 means it was the three hundred and fifty-third law passed in that session. The slip laws are compiled at the end of the congressional session and published in chronological order in the Statutes at Large, which is the other citation in the parenthetical: 124 refers the volume of the Statutes at Large (abbreviated as Stat.) and 3959 refers to the page number of the volume where that law starts.
- Use the Public Law or Statutes at Large citation to find the bill in the following sources: Congress.gov, Proquest Congressional, Westlaw, Lexis.
- Congress.gov (a free source): Choose the Advanced Searches link on the top of the screen, then select the correct congressional session, and enter the search using the suggested citation forms in the “Legislation and Law Numbers” search box. For example, if you are looking for the bill number associated with Pub. L. 111-353, you would check mark the box for the 111th Congress, then enter 111PL353 in the “Legislation and Law Number” search box. Your result is H.R. 2751 FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. H.R. stands for House of Representatives, so you know it is a House Bill.
- Proquest Congressional (subscription – available at some academic and public law libraries): From the start page, choose “Search for a Citation,” then select “Public Laws” if you are using a public law citation. Use the drop-down menu to select the correct congressional session and enter the law number. You will get information for the public law, including the bill number.
- Westlaw (subscription): Westlaw will do a lot of work for you. When you scroll to the end of a statutory section on Westlaw, you will find the source note with a hyperlink to the public law number. When you select that link, you will get the public law, which also refers to the bill number. You will see tabs across the top of the page: Bill Drafts, Legislative History Materials, and Statutes Affected. The Legislative History tab will list citations to reports and the Congressional Record. Keep in mind that Westlaw may not provide all the legislative history materials that exist, but rather, only select documents.
- Lexis (subscription): On Lexis, when you scroll to the source note at the end of the statute, you will find a hyperlink to the public law. When you select that link, you will see the public law, with a reference to the bill number. On the right side of the screen, you will find links to Bill Tracking, Bill Text, and CIS Legislative History. The CIS Legislative History link provides access to many legislative history materials.
- Use the Bill number to find legislative history materials in the following sources:
- Congress.gov: When you are looking at the relevant bill, you will find an overview, as well as tabs that provide a summary, the text of the bill, actions taken, titles of the act, amendments, sponsors, committees, and related bills. In those categories, you will find links to other documents.
- Proquest Congressional (subscription): Once you have the bill number, you can use the “Search for a Citation” option, select the correct congressional session, and enter your bill number in the search box. When you get the resulting bill, you will see the following tabs where you can access information: Overview, Actions, Committees, Sponsors, Related publications, and Bill text.
Compiled Legislative History
You can find compiled legislative histories for certain laws. A compiled legislative history means that someone has collected all the legislative history documents associated with a law and put them in one place. Compiled legislative histories can be found in the following resources: Legal Histories of Selected U.S. Laws on the Internet: Free Sources, Proquest Legislative Insight (subscription), HeinOnline’s U.S. Federal Legislative History Library (subscription with some public law libraries providing free access), Department of Justice Legislative Histories (free), Westlaw (subscription), and Lexis (subscription).
On Westlaw, you can find Arnold and Porter Legislative Histories and U.S. GAO Legislative Histories. From the Westlaw start screen, click on the Content tab to find Specialty Areas, then Legislative History. Under the “Federal” heading you will see a link for U.S. GAO Legislative Histories. Clicking on that link will allow you to search by terms or by various citations. To find Arnold and Porter Legislative Histories, from the Legislative History link under the Content tab, look at the right side of the page under “Tools and Resources” and click on the Arnold and Porter link. You will find a list of acts that have compiled legislative histories.
On Lexis, under “Content,” click on the Statutes and Legislation link, then under “content type,” select “Legislative Histories” to find several compiled legislative histories as well as other documents.
On HeinOnline, find the U.S. Federal Legislative History Library in the list of databases. You can look at the U.S. Federal Legislative History Title Collection to find a list of acts that have compiled legislative histories. Or, you can navigate “Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories” to find legislative histories by bill number, public law number, popular name of the public law, or congressional session.
Proquest Legislative Insight allows you to search for compiled histories by using several different types of citations or use the “Advance Search” option to search by term.
State Legislative History Research (Oregon Example)
The most important legislative history materials in Oregon are the documents and audio or video recordings from the committees that consider the bill. You will be looking for committee minutes or audio and video logs of the committee hearings and work sessions; audio and video recordings of hearings and work sessions; exhibits that were introduced; the original bill file; audio or video recordings of activities from the chamber floor; and journals that show votes recorded in the chambers. The availability and format for these materials, and where you can find them, depends on the date of the legislative activity. The next section will discuss the various sources of Oregon legislative history in greater detail.
For more information on researching state legislative history, look for a research guide. In your browser, type Oregon (or whatever the relevant state is) legislative history research guide. For example, using that type of search, you will get results such as Oregon Legislative History Research from the Lewis and Clark Law School, Legislative History Research from the State of Oregon Law Library, Oregon Legislative Records Guide from the Oregon State Archives, or Oregon Legislative History Research from the University of Oregon. Such guides can be found for legislative history research in other states as well.
Sources of Oregon Legislative History
Minutes and Audio and Video Logs
Committee minutes summarize the discussions that take place in legislative committees. The minute summaries (also known as tape logs) help researchers locate where a particular topic was discussed on the recordings. You can find these logs in different places and forms depending on the year:
2014 – forward: Recording logs located on the Oregon State Archives website.
2007-2014: Audio logs listing only the speakers name and the recorded time, with links to mp3 audio files can be found on the Oregon State Archives website.
1991-2005: Audio logs with links to some audio recordings can be found on the Oregon State Archives website.
1926-mid 1990s: Minutes are located on microfilm at some academic and public law libraries.
Audio and video recordings of committee hearings and work sessions
The Oregon State Archives website has online audio recordings available for 1999 forward.
Links to archived video and audio recordings from 1999 forward are available on the Oregon Legislature’s website. From the Oregon Legislature’s home page, go to the “Get Involved” tab and then select Audio and Video. You will find a section for recent archives for sessions within the last year. On the right side of the page is a section heading “Expand: View Archives” that links to audio and video recordings on OLIS back to the 1999-2000 legislative session.
From 2015 – present, you can find online videos with a log on the same screen on the Oregon Legislature’s website (which links to OLIS) by searching for the bill number in the correct legislative session, then selecting the link under “Measure History” and finding the meeting date and time on the right side of the screen.
Exhibits
Exhibits are submitted by committee staff, legislators, and the public in response to a proposed bill. They include letters, proposed amendments, written testimony, and reports. You can find online exhibits for legislative sessions 2007 – present on the Oregon Legislature’s website using the session and bill number, and looking under the Analysis tab.
You can also contact the Oregon State Archives for help finding older exhibits.
Bill files
Original bill files are located at the Oregon State Archives. They are files that contain the original measure, with subsequent engrossed versions of the bill, as well as committee reports, amendments, and staff measure analyses. From 2007 to present, you can find some of this information on the Oregon Legislature’s website (which links to OLIS) using the session and bill number, and looking under the Text, Analysis, Meeting Material/Exhibits, and Amendments tabs.
Audio and video recordings of chamber debates
Audio and video recordings of chamber debates are available on the Oregon Legislature’s website for legislative sessions 1999 forward. From the “Get Involved” page, go to Audio and Video, and find the View Archives links on the right side of the page. For older sessions, the Oregon State Archives has audio tapes.
Journals
House and Senate Journals record the actions of the chambers while they are in session. In the journals you can find votes, explanations of votes, and messages from the Governor. Senate journals are available online from 2012 on the Secretary of the Senate web page. House journals are available online from 2001 on the Chief Clerk of the House web page.
Research Process Steps
The steps for researching Oregon legislative history are similar to those discussed above for federal legislative history.
- Locate the relevant Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) section for your problem or issue. (See Chapter 10).
- From the ORS section, scroll to the end of the statute to find the source note which will list the session law number. For example, this is the source note for ORS 471.175. [1999 c.351 §2; 2001 c.104 §213; 2001 c.154 §1; 2010 c.33 §2; 2011 c.180 §1; 2013 c.32 §1; 2019 c.57 §27; 2021 c.180 §7; 2021 c.275 §3; 2021 c.351 §51]. The session law is the law that is passed by the legislature. The citation 2021 c.275 §3 refers to the 2021 Session Laws, chapter 275, section 3.
- Use the session law to find the bill. Once you have a Session Law citation, go to the Oregon Legislature’s website, and select the Bills and Laws tab. On the left side of the page, click on the link to Oregon Laws. Select the correct session and scroll until you find the correct chapter. Once you are looking at the session law, you will see the bill number to the right of the chapter number. Using the session law referenced above, you would go to Oregon Laws, choose the 2021 Session, then scroll down to find chapter 275. The bill number to the right of chapter 275 is SB 317. SB refers to Senate Bill.
- Use the bill number to find legislative history materials. On the Bills and Laws page of the Oregon Legislature’s website, find the Bills menu on the left side. Select the correction session for your bill, then scroll down the results to find your bill number. Using the example above, you would select 2021 Session Bills, then scroll down the list of results to find SB 317. You will see an Overview of the bill and tabs to access the Text, Analysis, Amendments, etc. If you scroll down, you will find Measure History, which you can expand to find links to public hearings and work sessions.
- In the legislative history materials, look for recordings and related documents. When you link to the public hearings and work sessions, you will find links to testimony, letters, and reports. On the right side of the page are links to recordings and recording logs.
Practice Activity:
Students can work through the following example in class either in groups or individually and then discuss. For online classes, student can work through the example individually then use a discussion board to discuss process and results.
Your client has been a home brewer in Oregon and is thinking about starting to sell her beer, so you have been looking at statutes that outline the licensing schemes in Oregon. The presumption is that her home brew operation so far has not been subject to licensing laws. In this example, you are going to look at the history of Oregon Revised Statute 471.037 to learn more about the motivations, values, incentives, etc. in passing that law.
- Use the Oregon Legislature’s website to look up ORS 471.037 and find the session law that passed that law (2011).
- Look up the session law to find the bill number.
- Use the bill number to find measure history.
- Listen to the hearing/session.
The following video will demonstrate the research steps to find the legislative history for 471.037.
Student Discussion and Reflection Questions
- What is the most challenging aspect of legislative history research for you?
Contribute a discussion or reflection question to this section.
sample exercises for legislative history
Creating legislative history problems for student practice is a challenge. The goal is to tie them in some way to a realistic situation, while also facilitating practice with various platforms and legislative history documents. Below are some suggestions for legislative history practice that are related to the Client File for Isabel Perez-Anders presented in Chapter 3.
Federal Legislative History
In the client file, the client Isabel indicates that she wants to know how to track and research legislation, federal and state, that impacts brewers, specifically for of brewing beer with CBD or cannabis. Since recreational cannabis has been legalized and regulated, both federal and state laws have had to define new terminology and amend historical legal categories of the substance. Some recent legal changes have focused on industrial hemp. Some statutory sections that were modified in 2018 with regard to how hemp is treated under federal law are Title 7 USC sections 1639o, 1639p, 1639q, 1639r, and 1639s and 7 USC 3319d (c)(3)(E); 21 USC 802 and 812 (c)(17). I think it was the 2018 Farm Bill, or Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 and related bills. We need to find legislative history documents for the law that discusses hemp. The documents could be the Congressional Record, House or Senate Reports, Conference Reports and Congressional Research Service documents.
State Legislative History (Oregon)
In 2021, Oregon made some changes to hemp laws as reflected in ORS 571.269. We need to find the legislative history material for that law. Please look at the hearings and work sessions to find testimony and witness statements by people and organizations that are in the hemp industry. Please listen to any recordings of discussions of hemp. From this information, please summarize the concerns of those in the hemp industry with regard to passage of this law.
ideas for federal or state legislative history practice problems
Contribute ideas for federal and/or state legislative history problems.