Researching and Writing Comments and Substantial Papers

For a comprehensive guide to federal legislative history research guide, see our Federal Legislative History research guide.

The core legislative history resource is ProQuest Congressional. ProQuest Congressional includes full text legislative history documents back to the 18th century. From 1970 on, it also includes legislative histories prepared by Congressional Information Service, Inc. (CIS), which contain a variety of information about a law's enactment, including a short summary of the statute, citations to the enacted and any related bills, the dates of any floor debates with references to the Congressional Record, and the titles and dates of any reports, hearings, prints, and presidential statements relating to the law.

To locate case and docket information for a case, as well as the court filings themselves, you will need to search PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from Federal Appellate, District and Bankruptcy courts. PACER is searchable via Bloomberg Law in the "Litigation & Dockets" tab.