The starting place for legislative history research is always the statute itself. Use the current annotated code, the United States Code Annotated, in this instance to find the current statute text.
Often, researchers are given the “popular name” of the statute only without a citation to the U.S. Code. A popular name is given to a law even before it becomes a law. A funny example, is the “How Many Legislators Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb Act”, which was the popular name of an actual bill considered by the California legislature.
This popular name accompanies the bill from the time it is introduced until it is enacted. Even after an enacted law has been codified, that is, renumbered and incorporated into the U.S. Code, it may still be known by its popular name. How do you find the law when you know only its popular name? Use the popular name table.
The Popular Name table can be found together with Indexes at the end of any of the print U.S. Code sets. The following set is the United States Code Annotated (USCA) published by Thompson-West. As explained under the prior tab on how laws are published, always use an annotated version of the code as it contains references to case law and other useful editorial features.
On Westlaw, the popular name table is a link from the USCA database, as shown below. On Lexis, there is a popular name database. On both Westlaw and Lexis, you can look up the popular name alphabetically.
Look carefully at the entry in the Popular Name table. It contains the citation (title and sections) to the current version of the statute in the U.S. Code. In addition, you may see references to the original enactment and later amendments as published in the Statutes at Large (Stat.)
It is essential to have some understanding as to how a code is organized in order to navigate statutes effectively. As mentioned in the prior tab on how laws are published, the U.S. Code is organized into 50 broad subject titles. At the beginning of each title, one can find a table of contents, which divides the title into smaller components such as chapters and subchapters. Below, for example, is the table of contents for Title 15 on Commerce and Trade as contained in the print version of the U.S. Code.
Mini tables of contents at the beginning of each chapter further divide the laws into smaller components such as parts or acts. For citation purposes, sections are the smallest divisions, but some complex laws may be subdivided further into subsections, subparts, subparagraphs etc.
Using tools like the popular name table and the tables of contents in order to find the relevant statutory citation and text are preliminary steps for doing legislative history research as shown in the next tab.