Policy Researcher Tutorial

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18. Access to Legal Documents in the Public Domain

Governments worldwide are increasingly using the Internet to publish their official publications. The Internet can offer the full text of legislation, sometimes before the text is available on paper! The processes that comprise legislative history are of two distinct types - determining the meaning or intent of an enacted law and ascertaining the status of a pending bill. The specific tools or components of legislative history consist of the bill and its successive amendments, remarks by the bill's sponsors, floor discussion and debate, committee hearings, committee reports and committee prints. To varying degrees these documents are accessible online at:

GPO ACCESS (for Legislative Branch Resources, as well as for Executive Resources like the Code of Federal Regulations and Federal Register. )
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html
Public Laws, 103rd Congress, 1995+ via GPO Access
Limit search to Public Law file; search by subject or Public Law number in quotation marks (e.g. "Public Law 104-3")

THOMAS (for legislative law only)
http://thomas.loc.gov/
Search Thomas by law number.
Law numbers can be identified by searching Bill Summary and Status using keyword or sponsor and then delimiting as "Public Law", indexes all laws since 1973 and provides the full text since 1993. Full texts of bills back to 1989. Searchable by keyword, subject, sponsor, bill number, etc. Includes Congressional Record, Committee Reports, Committee Hearings, and roll call votes. Produced by the Library of Congress.

THOMAS and GPO Access are mainly good for 103rd Congress to the present. For older bills and public laws not online, visit your local Depository Library.

Cornell version of the U.S.Code Popular Names List with links to amendments.

Consider these resources for controversial topics:

Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the non-partisan public policy research arm of the United States Congress. Each year CRS produces almost 1,000 new products, and over 4,000 updated or revised reports, however only a small number of these are made available to the public on the Internet.  Although CRS does maintain an intranet for CRS reports (CRS Web) this network is only accessible by members of Congress, Congressional committees, and CRS sister agencies (e.g. GAO).  Members of the public requiring access to these reports have traditionally had to ask their Representative in Congress for paper copies to be mailed to them or have had to purchase them through a third party. Some Congressional Research Service Reports are available at:

Open CRS
http://www.opencrs.com/
Search engine for major collections of Congressional Research Service reports

Memory Hole
http://www.thememoryhole.org/crs/
Numerous 1990s CRS reports formerly hosted by Christopher Shays and Mark Green