When you're conducting legislative history research, you want to find what the legislature (in this case, Congress) was thinking when they wrote, amended, and/or passed the law. Congress expresses itself mainly in committee reports and hearings. The reports are published separately and as part of larger collections of Congressional documents. Hearings are sometimes reported separately and often included in the Congressional Record, Congress' newspaper which covers Congress' activities.
Committee Reports, Hearings, and the Congressional Record can be found in print, on public websites, and on private legal databases. The resources on the left side of this page are federal government websites and their content is free. The resources on the right are from a private, subscription database, HeinOnline, that is free to use at the Law Library.
Which resource is best? Congress.gov is sorted by Public Law so it makes researching the last 25 years easier. HeinOnline allows you to keyword search all of the Congressional Serial Set (reports, hearings, and more) starting with material from 1817. However, all of the information for a particular Public Law will not be in one place.
It will take trial and error to figure out which is the best for the research you're doing. Once you've searched each source - Congressional Reports, Hearings, and the Congressional Record, you don't need to do any more.
Congress.gov has online bill information beginning with the 93rd Congress (1973-1974) and continuing through today’s floor action. Hyperlinks include a bill’s description, the text, and the sponsors.
You can access Public Laws by clicking on the Public Laws link in the Bill Searches and Lists area of the top grey box. The Laws are displayed first by Congress, then numerically. So if you are looking for Public Law 95-23, you'll need to first click the Public Law link. On the new webpage, use the pulldown menu to show a specific Congress (in this case the 95th). You'll get a list of all the public laws from the 95th Congress. Scroll for the one you're looking for. Click the link for that Public Law and a new page will open. You can find information such as the bill's text, actions taken, amendments, committees, and more.
Committee Reports are available starting with the 104th Congress. You can find them for a particular Public Law once you're on the Law's page, then click on the Committees tab. If there is a report, it will be listed under the Reports heading and there should be a link to open the report.
Congressional Committee Hearings and Reports are available through Govinfo.gov, the Government Publishing Office's electronic document website.
The coverage is the same as Congress.gov, starting in 1995-96 with the 104th Congress. All the Congressional Committee Hearings and Reports are available in one place, and they are sorted by the committee, then by congressional term.
Congressional Documents are different from Congressional Committee Reports. They cover a wide variety of topics and may include reports of executive departments and independent organizations, reports of special investigations made for Congress, and annual reports of non-governmental organizations.
The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. This can be valuable for determining the thoughts and intent behind federal legislation.
At the end of each session of Congress, all of the daily editions are collected, re-paginated, and re-indexed into a permanent, bound edition. This permanent edition, referred to as the Congressional Record (Bound Edition), is made up of one volume per session of Congress, with each volume published in multiple parts, each part containing approximately 10 to 20 days of Congressional proceedings. The primary ways in which the bound edition differs from the daily edition are continuous pagination and somewhat edited, revised, and rearranged text.
Govinfo.gov provides coverage of the entire run of the Congressional Record - back to 1873.
Hein Online is a legal database available to users in the Law Library. To get to HeinOnline from a Law Library computer, go to the Law Library website, and click on Databases, then click on the Hein Online link.
They have the entire United States Congressional Serial Set available. The Serial Set includes committee reports related to bills and other matters, presidential communications to Congress, treaty materials, certain executive department publications, and certain non-governmental publications. The Serial Set goes back to the 15th Congress, 1st Session (1817).
You can access the Serial Set by selecting US Congressional Serial Set from the Browse Databases by Name on Hein's homepage.
Documents before 1817 may be found in the American State Papers collection. You an access this collection by following these steps: