A legislative  history is a compilation of documents produced at each stage of the legislative (congressional) process.

Legislative history documents may be used:

To aid a court in its interpretation of statutes, but only if:

• The statutory language is unclear on its face;
• No statutory canons exist to guide the court in its interpretation; and
• There are no existing judicial or federal agency interpretations of the statutory language

OR

to track a pending bill as it moves through Congress.

Your legislative research will be much easier if you locate as much as possible of the following information for each act:

1. its Public Law number (or chapter number for laws passed before 1957);
2. its location in the U.S. Statutes at Large;
3. the date of enactment;
4. the number of the House or Senate bill and Congress that was enacted.

Your online searching will be more precise if you use them; you will retrieve less irrelevant material.

• Federal Legislative History Research - Compiled Legislative History, by Lee Peoples
• Researching Federal Legislative History, by Nancy Johnson

​To obtain the access code for these lessons, visit http://www.cali.org/user/register and enter access code "AMERICstu4"