The Congressional Record records debate on the floor of Congress. Many times, Congressmen read a company's written remarks into the record. Find debate, select committee reports and bills, and commentary. GPO Access offers this information from 1994. 29 April 2008. The University of California at Berkeley Library offers Flash tutorials on how to find Congressional materials in the Library and on the Internet. Currently, the tutorials cover finding legislation, hearings and debates. Use of the tutorials requires the Flash video player. 13 September 2002. Prepared by the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, this publication offers the text of the Constitution, amendments, proposed amendments not ratified by the States, and case annotations. Researchers may perform keyword searches or download relevant portions of the text. Downloading in portable document format (.pdf) is also available.
Revised 13 September 2002. Cornell Legal Information Institute offers this gateway to federal and state constitutions, laws, and regulations. Several of these materials are available via Cornell LII servers. While the site typically improves on the use of the materials by adding search and browsing features, researchers should take care to verify and update information they find. More current sources of the United States Code (USC) and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) exist. 27 November 2007. The U.S. Copyright Office makes available Title 17 of the United States Code both as text (displayable in a browser) and PDF. You may download a PDF copy of the entire text or individual chapters. Appendices contain various copyright laws, including The Copyright Act of 1976, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, The Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994, copyright-related sections of Titles 18 (Crimes), 28 (Judicial Procedure) and 44 (Public Printing), and more. Searching is available only through the site's search engine. Revised 16 May 2003. Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Law School library, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws offers drafts and final versions of Uniform and Model Acts. The documents are available in Word, Word Perfect, ascii text, and PDF formats. When relevant, the site also provides meeting agendas, statements, and commentary. 9 February 2001. The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. offers this document, which explains, in detail, the process of researching, compiling and sifting through the legislative documents for legislative intent. It links to relevant Web sites and provides an extensive bibliography of law journal articles and other Web sites dealing with federal legislative history research.
6 September 2002. Revised 25 February 2005. Search the U.S. Constitution, United States Code (USC), Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) or the Federal Register. Also find databases containing opinions from the Circuit Courts of Appeals, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court (1893-present). While some features at FindLaw improve the use of these resources over their availability elsewhere on the Web, researchers should take care to verify and update information they find. Other more current sources for the U.S. Constitution, USC, and CFR exist. You can also use this site to find other sources of federal and state case law and statutes. 30 August 2002. Revised 3 February 2006. A long-time, consistently up-to-date favorite amongst legal researchers is this guide to sources providing full-text state laws and legislation. It covers statutes, constitutions, session laws, legislation and administrative regulations. Since the guide includes some non-authoritative sources, legal professionals should verify information with another source. 9 February 2005. Created by a talented graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania (but unaffiliated with the university), GovTrack helps you monitor federal legislation. You can track activity involving certain bills, Congressmen or subjects. Useful search aids help you find relevant legislation or the Representative for your district. GovTrack's sources include Thomas, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Register free with the site to begin monitoring. You can then monitor new information online, or via e-mail or RSS feed.
This is the authoritative site for federal congressional and regulatory information. Search for pending legislation, recently enacted public laws, and more. Also find the Congressional Record, Federal Register, and United States Code. By Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C., this site serves as a replacement for CQ's former Congress In Print. The Library of Congress supplies this research guide to electronic sources of floor proceedings. Check out the audio links! 18 July 2002. Find live webcasts of hearings and markups, news, information about current legislation, hearing transcripts, committee prints, and more. This official web site provides weekly schedules of events, information about the legislative process, roll call vote tallys, and more. 5 September 2001. Congressman Mark Green offers an index to, and the text of, select Congressional Research Reports. These reports "serve Congress throughout the legislative process by providing comprehensive and reliable legislative research and analysis." The index breaks down into four categories -- issue briefs, appropriation reports, short and long reports. The reports themselves appear in portable document format. 26 May 2005. Part of the Library of Congress' American Memory collections, The James Madison Papers presents a short history of the documents, scanned images of six of the seven series that comprise the Madison Papers, an extensive bibliography of Madison's writings, a timeline of his life, and several related essays. Series 1 consists of general correspondence (letters, drafts, enclosures); series 2, additional correspondence restored during 1958; series 3, Madison-Armstrong correspondence from 1813 to 1836; series 4, a brief autobiography and legal documents; series 5, Madison's and Thomas Jefferson's notes on the debates dated 1776 to 1788; series 6, miscellaneous manuscripts, including a book manuscript, notes on the Articles of Confederation and other issues of the times, and other documents. You may search the collection or browse it by title, name or series. 16 June 2008. Non-profit organization, Public.Resource.Org, whose mission is to make all court cases available online for free, now offers the content of the former FLITE database. FLITE, launched by the Judge Advocate General's (JAG Corps) JAG Corps, later changed hands and became the Department of Justice's JURIS database.
JURIS consists of a virtual federal law library. "The general legal data base currently includes the full text of over 225,000 federal cases, including headnotes, as well as headnotes from over 475,000 state court cases. The data base also contains a large number of statutory, regulatory, and administrative files." See the database contents here.
While the contents note referenced above indicates that the database is frequently updated, it appears to be current through 1992 or 1993, depending on the section. You may browse the database directory or download portions or the whole database. There is no search feature. 30 October 2001. Thomas has compiled this list of legislation and legislative activity related to the events of September 11, 2001. It includes enacted legislation, approved resolutions, bills with floor activity, and legislation without floor action. The University of Michigan Documents Center offers this research guide to everything you ever wanted (or didn't want!) to know about legislative research. 16 March 2000. Revised 3 February 2006. The Legislative Research Special Interest Section of the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. offers this compilation of research guides and practical articles about legislative research and documents. Find, for example, a Q&A on conducting legislative and regulatory research. A service of Georgia State University Law School, GSU Online, the Meta-Index provides a search interface to sites offering court opinions, statutes, legislation, regulations and more. This is an easy-to-use tool that guides researchers through varying search processes at different sites. The owners also regularly check the functionality of the site and its links. 1 February 2005. The Library of Congress offers select primary source material pertaining to U.S. military law. Find the Military Law Review, the quarterly journal of the U.S. Armed Forces. Full-text articles are available from 1958 to present in PDF. Also available is the 9-volume series, Enactments and Approved Papers of the Control Council and Coordinating Committee of the Allied Control Authority. Issued from 1945 to 1948, the documents represented law during post-World War II occupied Germany. You can access the papers by subject, or by type of enactment chronologically. Recently added to the collection is a legislative history on the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The history consists of the 1950 edition of the law, select 1912-1920 revisions to the Articles of War, and the Elston Act (1948)--a revision of the Articles of War, which also served as the precursor to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. MultiState Associates Incorporated offers this no nonsense chart of official state legislative information. 6 August 2007. The legislative research librarians of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) make available this index to 50-state compilations covering various issues that concern state legislators and legislative staff. Topics include banking, criminal justice, education, health, immigration, and more. The compilations typically cover several years of legislative activity. 5 February 2008. With help from Westlaw, the New York Secretary of State makes available an unofficial compilation of all New York State codes, rules and regulations. Currently, you cannot browse the collection. "This initial release of the online NYCRR does not yet include a table of contents. To find desired text, visitors [click the link for NYCRR, and then] simply enter a search term or NYCRR citation. A table of contents will be available in the near future."
Technical note: Your browser must allow for pop-ups from westlaw.com. Free text searching (the use of exact keywords and Boolean or proximity connectors) is not allowed. You may conduct "natural language searching" only. 24 October 2007. Revised 25 October 2007. The government of Ontario, Canada makes available e-Laws, a database of statutes and regulations, both consolidated and source law. You may search or browse the laws. The database supports advanced proximity connectors and wildcard searching, so be sure to review the help documentation (called Designing a Search).
When you review search results, or browse the laws, you may go back and forth between hits or adjacent documents. Search terms are highlighted. Citations to the latest amendment, as well as information about the last database upload, appear at the beginning of each law. You may also download laws in Word format.
Please note: To experience the full functionality of the site, you must enable javascript. 16 July 2007. Revised 18 July 2007. This is the official Web site for access to Pennsylvania consolidated laws. You may browse, download and print the laws in ascii text or PDF. You may also search by keyword or legal citation. Search results may be displayed with highlighted terms.
Researchers should note that this collection of Pennsylvania laws is incomplete. As the title indicates, it consists of consolidated statutes only. Not all statutes in the state have been consolidated. Therefore, at this time, we recommend using an up-to-date print edition called Purdon's or an online legal research service such as Lexis or Westlaw. 14 February 2008. Revised 18 March 2008. Owned and powered by Fastcase, The Public Library of Law (PLoL) makes available all cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appellate cases from 1950 forward, appellate cases from all 50 states back to 1997, the U.S. Code, select statutes or codes from all 50 states, as well as select state regulations, court rules and constitutions. While the case law appears to come directly from Fastcase, other legal documents originate from external sources, such as the House of Representatives (U.S. Code), state legislatures and other trustworthy legal sources. PLoL simply offers an alternate search interface.
Searching here is more advanced than what you would find at a public Web search engine. For instance, the database supports the within (W/n) proximity connector. It also supports Boolean, exact phrase searching and wildcard (*) searching (right-hand truncation only).
Technical notes: You must activate javascript to use this Web site. You must register to display the full text of case law. 18 July 2007. Revised 18 July 2007. Developed by journalists affiliated with NewAssignment.Net, including New York University journalism professor, Jay Rosen, this Wiki proposes to create a resource for understanding popular federal legislation. There isn't much content here to date. Currently, the Wiki offers plain-English analysis and the text of legislation for the following: the Patent Reform Act of 2007, several Internet-related bills, including the SAFE Act of 2007, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007, the FAIR USE Act of 2007 and two video game bills - the Truth in Video Game Rating Act and the Video Game Decency Act of 2007.
This is a worthy endeavor to make legal information something the general public can understand. However, I caution researchers to verify the information before relying on it. There is no way to determine the author/s of the individual analyses or his/her credentials. Moreover, as is usually the case with Wiki technology, the text may be edited by any registered user. Discover recent legislative actions, information about committees and senators, and more at this official site. 20 June 2002. John Marshall Law School professor David E. Sorkin offers easy access to U.S. federal and state, as well as European Union and other country, laws regarding mass email. The site covers both enacted laws and proposed legislation. 23 October 2001. The University of Minnesota's Alcohol Epidemiology Program provides a database of state alcohol legislation enacted since 1997. Find summaries of legislation as well as the full-text of enacted versions. I emphasized that this is NOT a state laws database. Content provided comes from StateNet, a well-known provider of state legislative information, and consists of the text of the law as enacted. A current reading of the law would encompass reviewing all enacted versions, including those passed prior to 1997. This is, however, a useful resource for comparing state legislation or initiating a review of a state law's legislative history.
Also available at this site is commentary pertaining to policies that restrict youth access to alcohol, model alcohol control ordinances, an overview of state alcohol policies, an alcohol compliance check procedures manual, and a detailed research guide on finding information pertaining to alcohol law. Search state government sites with FindLaw's LawCrawler interface to official state government Web pages. 6 October 1999. Formerly a joint Villanova/Chicago-Kent effort, this resource now resides at Chicago-Kent. Please note the new Web address.
Use the State Web Locator to find Web sites for state agencies. Many of these will link to official state legislative pages.
Revised 18 April 2008. Created by the Library of Congress, Thomas offers an alternative legislative and regulatory information source to GPO Access. The site provides bill summaries and status as well as the complete text of legislation. It provides access to public laws, the Congressional Record, Congressional committee reports, and numerous historical documents including The Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and papers from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention. 18 September 2002. FindLaw reprints, and modifies the formatting of, the Library of Congress publication, The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation. FindLaw's version incorporates the 1996 and 1998 supplements into the text of the 1992 document. (NOTE: It does not incorporate the recent 2000 supplement.) It also creates hyperlinks for internal reference and browsing.
SEE ALSO: The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation, Library of Congress, 1992 with 1996, 1998, and 2000 supplements.
3 January 2001. The Government Printing Office has created a new interface to the United States Code. Designed for those who would like to browse the Code, users first select a title, then a chapter, part, and section. The U.S. House of Representatives offers the United States Code as of 26 January 1998. Use the search form to facilitate finding relevant sections. Remember to update the Code with The U.S. Code Classification Tables. Revised 22 October 2004. Cornell's Legal Information Institute provides a search interface to the official U.S. Code available at the House of Representatives. Locate relevant Code sections by citation, single title search, or by searching the entire Code.
Nice features include internal hyperlinks to referenced sections of the Code, historical notes with links to public laws when available, references to relevant sections of the CFR, and an update feature. Each section also reflects the date of the most recent version (as available at the House of Representatives).
1 February 2005. The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C., Inc. publishes a Legislative Source Book, which is compiled by members of the Legislative Research Special Interest Section. Richard J. McKinney, Assistant Law Librarian at the Federal Reserve Board, prepared this collection of outlines on the history of the publication of U.S. laws and the U.S. Code. The section also links to the update tables for the U.S. Code, as well as several commercial and free Web sites for obtaining U.S. statutes or the U.S. Code. The Library of Congress introduces digital images of early Statutes at Large volumes. Statutes at Large represents the official publication of the laws and resolutions of the United States Congress. It contains all private and public laws in chronological order. Prior to 1948, it also published all treaties and international agreements approved by the Senate.
The site promises to add volumes in the future.
One of the best Internet sources for government information, the University of Michigan Documents Center offers numerous research guides pertaining to federal, state, and local government information. 10 September 2002. This commercial site offers databases of state and federal case law.
An alternative to traditional online legal research systems, VersusLaw provides access to federal and state case law, as well as, federal statutes and regulations, legal news, and forms. Online documentation indicates tribal and foreign court availability, but does not specify which courts.
LLRX features three articles by reviewer T.R. Halvorson, which cover this service. See Survey of Online Legal Information Alternatives for Small Law Firms and Public Law Libraries, Preview of VersusLaw’s USConline, CFRonline, and CFRupdate!, and VersusLaw's V.: A View through the Southern California Online Users Group Rating Scale Lenses.
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