Now that you have put in the work to learn more about your policy area and chosen a legislation that you want to explore, it is time to do work and learn more about the ins-and-outs of the legislation. One of the best way to get in-depth information is to explore the legislative histories. For this next step you are going to explore all of the information and documents that are created and used to shape legislation.
Legislative histories or tracings show all pieces of legislative item's history as it moves through the law making process. Usually histories or tracings show a summary of the topic, dates bills were discussed in committees, hearings, reports related to the legislative issue, and more.
Legislative histories and tracings provide rich contextual information about the legislation's formation. Edits to bills, congressional testimony, and viewing political processes provide a window into the complex network and circular nature of public policy. For example, a history will link to past versions of bills and hearings. From the hearings you will be able to view transcripts and read arguments made by witnesses from Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens. This contextual information helps shape the policy story for any policy researcher.
ProQuest Legislative Insight is a federal legislative history service that makes available thoroughly researched compilations of digital full-text publications created by Congress during the process leading up to the enactment of U.S. Public Laws.
Search for a public law by name, citation number (this can be the number of a bill, law, hearing, etc ...), or subject on the home page.
The Serial Set contains the House and Senate Documents and the House and Senate Reports. In general, it includes: committee reports related to bills and other matters, presidential communications to Congress, treaty materials, certain executive department publications, and certain non-governmental publications. Unlike legislative histories you cannot find hearings in the collection, however, you can find Congressional Record documents.
The best way to locate documents in the serial set is to know the citation information of the documents you are looking for. The collections are so large, that searching for you policy by subject is not very effective.
Use the following exercises to learn more about your locating and using legislative histories.