Knowing how to do legislative-history research, at least in the federal system, is now not really any different than simply having general knowledge of the work-product of Congress: what, in a documentary sense, is it that the legislature actually does?
It wasn’t always so. “Legislative history” research has long had a sort of mystique among legal practitioners, and even among librarians. Early in my career, I even worked for a senior librarian who would “spring” a mock legislative history question upon unsuspecting candidates for entry-level librarian jobs: the idea (besides assessing general demeanor and presence in a reference discussion) was that familiarity with certain indexes and other finding tools was the perfect proxy to distinguish the candidate who actually knew his practical art as a reference librarian from someone who might have gone to law and/or library school but hadn’t acquired any real hands-on depth in the field.
But the world has changed. Legislative history research was ‘hard,’ but it was hard in a particular way. It required familiarity and facility with certain obscure and specific tools with very particular and non-obvious limitations (Which index worked only for years after 1970? Which tools were organized by calendar year, and which by Congressional session? And whatever crazy obscurity is a ‘CIS number’?). And of course these were all printed sources or very crude online conversions thereof. This was knowledge the ordinary, if highly skilled, researcher would not necessarily have — it was of necessity outsourced to the library and its pool of specialists who had mastered the obscure mechanics of these hard-to-access specialty resources. And librarians did a lot of this research, because it was perceived as something that “only” the library could provide.
Legislative history research no longer has (so much of) that kind of ‘artificial’ difficulty — the learning curve is no longer such a cliff driven higher solely by the obscurity and specialization of the interfaces of research tools. Not to too-lightly discount the centrality of my own profession, but at this point there is no reason that the “ordinary skilled” legal researcher, at least with access to the online resources of a law-school library, can’t access legislative documents perfectly well herself, with one major caveat.
That major caveat is that you do still have to know the underlying legislative endeavor well enough to know what you are looking for. If you no longer need so much “procedural familiarity” (such as knowing how to cross-reference the CIS number from the “black book” to the microfiche cabinet, or to understand how an index of “unpublished” hearings is organized, or simply how to navigate indexes and catalogs well enough to find the one book or article that has already “compiled” a legislative history) you do still need to know for what you seek: that the core elements of legislative work product include specific genres of documents such as Congressional Committee Reports and Committee Hearings; or that the Congressional Record is a strange and limited publication of (usually) little direct value for legislative research.
In my next post, I’ll include a brief “civics lesson” to identify those key documents generated in the legislative process. I will then address some online resources, notably the helpful commercial tools Proquest Congressional and Proquest Legislative Insight, as well as the public (and eventually to-be-replaced) Thomas and Government Printing Office resources. I’ll also mention how familiarity with the underlying “genres” you are looking for allows for effective use of less specialized online tools, notably Lexis and Westlaw.
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