As explained under the prior tab, USCCAN provides easy access to selected legislative history materials, primarily Reports. As described in the introduction, legislative history consists of all of the documentation that is generated by the legislative process. To go beyond USCCAN and find all these materials, one must use a research tool like the CIS Annual.
The most comprehensive CIS Annual set came into being in 1970, and the legislative history volumes, in particular, started in 1984. Earlier CIS sets covered only particular types of documents like hearings or the serial set. If you are researching a law that was enacted prior to 1970, you must use earlier CIS Indexes, such as the CIS Serial Set Index. If your law was enacted after 1984, it is covered by one of the CIS Legislative History volumes and you won’t need to use any other CIS volumes. Each Legislative History volume contains complete listings of all legislative history materials in Public Law number order. For example, laws enacted in 2003 can be found in the 2003 legislative history volume shown below. If the law predates the start of the legislative history volumes in 1984, one can use the Abstracts volumes to find a similar listing of legislative history materials.
As previously determined under Step #3 of the prior tab, the identity theft definition contained in the Fair Credit Reporting Act actually comes from P.L. 108-159, which is an amendment to the FCRA known as the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act or FACT Act of 2003. As shown below, the 2003 CIS Legislative History volume contains a complete listing of all legislative history materials relating to the FACT Act including: the public law itself, Congressional reports and documents, bills, hearings, Committee Prints and floor debates. The Abstracts and Legislative History volumes contain summaries of these materials. After reading these summaries, you can then decide if you wish to look up the full text in the accompanying CIS microfiche set. If you wish to see the full text, make a note of the CIS accession number in parentheses, as that number will lead you to the fiche you need. The microfiche provides an exact image of the original print document, including the same internal page numbering as the original.
At the beginning of the CIS listing, there is also a reference to the enacted bill, H.R. 2622. Make a note of this bill number as it is essential for finding debate in the Congressional Record.
The CIS Annual print volumes and fiche collection are on the 6th floor of the Library.
Note that the Library has replaced its subscription to PQ Congressional with ProQuest Legislative Insight. This new subscription is designed primarily with the legislative history researcher in mind. In fact, Legislative Insight includes materials related to enacted laws only (i.e. Public Laws).
Finding comprehensive compiled legislative histories with PQ Legislative Insight is very simple. All you need is either the public law number or popular name of the law you are researching. You can run either a public law number or popular name search from the Legislative Insight home page. If you have the public law number, you would enter it in the Citation Checker box as shown below. Note that Legislative Insight automatically fills in the Statutes at Large citation and enacted bill number.
This simple search pulls up the legislative history for this law.
A popular name search retrieves the same results plus the legislative history of any law which amends the law you are researching.
In this instance, the legislative history of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is included as it amends the FACT Act.
Whether you use a public law number or popular name search, you will retrieve the same legislative history of the FACT Act, P.L. 108-159. This legislative history consists of 59 documents as shown below.
Note that you can navigate these results by selecting Content Type. Thus if you select Congressional Record, you will be taken to that part of the legislative history containing references to debate. The Content filter allows you to exclude certain kinds of documents from the group of 59. Using this filter, you can exclude bills, for example, and see only references to reports, hearings etc.
You can also search within the 59 search results for specific terms or phrases such as "identity theft" by entering that phrase in the search box. Each document containing that phrase will then be flagged as shown below.
Again using the filter, you can navigate to the particular documents, for example, Congressional reports and see which reports contain your search terms. Star icons indicate a conference report, if any, and the most recent House and Senate Reports. Frequently, these reports are the best places to begin research about a law.
Each record of a report is linked to a full text digital pdf of the document. By retrieving the pdf and running a ctrl+f (find) search for the phrase "identity theft", you can go directly to the part of the document containing your search terms.
Legislative Insight also makes bluebook citation of these documents easy. By going back to the list of documents and clicking on publication detail for the first House Report, for example, then clicking on Export and selecting Bluebook in the menu provided, one can create an instant Bluebook citation to that document as shown below.
Legislative Insight also includes reports created for Congress by the Congressional Research Service or CRS. CRS reports are not considered part of the actual legislative history of a law, but they can be very useful to the researcher who wants to study the background and analysis of a law.
Another great feature of Legislative Insight is this Legislative Process chart. By entering the public law number, you can see exactly how your particular law made its way through Congress.
The Congress in Context feature gives you a broad overview of the major laws enacted during a particular Congress.
These and other features of PQ Legislative Insight make legislative history research easier and speedier than ever before possible. To learn more about researching with Legislative Insight, watch this brief video.