Library Guides: Federal Legislative History Research: Compiled Legislative Histories

Sources of compiled legislative histories

Proquest Legislative Insight This link opens in a new window
Extensive compilation of legislative histories of U.S. public laws enacted from 1789-present used to discover the legislative intent behind a specific law. Histories include the full text of the public law itself, all versions of related bills, law-specific Congressional Record excerpts, committee hearings, reports, prints, presidential signing statements, CRS reports, and other miscellaneous congressional publications. All documents are full-text, searchable PDFs.

Proquest Legislative Insight links to the full text of associated legislative history documents. Use the Search Within feature to search the full text of all the associated publications.

Westlaw: Legislative History This link opens in a new window
Westlaw has several collections of compiled legislative histories:
U.S. GAO Federal Legislative Histories
U.S. Code Congress & Administrative News
Legislative History - United States Code
HeinOnline: United States Federal Legislative History Library This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a shared digital repository created by major research libraries. It offers searching of the full text of books and full access to works in the public domain
UChicago users may login to download high quality PDF versions where available.

Wheeler, R. E., & Fegreus, J. E. (2018). Sources of compiled legislative histories: A bibliography of government documents, periodical articles, and books, 1st Congress-114th Congress (4th ed.). William S. Hein & Co., Inc.

Other useful Legislative History resources

ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
For pre-1970 legislation, ProQuest Congressional can be searched by bill number to find relevant congressional material.
Provides full text of committee hearings since 1817, Congressional committee reports since 1990, House and Senate Documents since 1995, selected committee prints since 1995, bills since 1789, and the Congressional Record since 1985.

Subject Guide

Connie Fleischer

Subjects: Law