Fast Facts
Understand issues related to making of the law
Professionally researched to CIS standard
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Overview
ProQuest legislative histories are comprised of fully searchable PDFs of full-text publications generated in the course of congressional lawmaking. Each history includes the full text of the public law itself, all versions of related bills, law-specific Congressional Record excerpts, committee hearings, reports, and prints. Also included are presidential signing statements, CRS reports, and miscellaneous congressional publications that provide background material to aid in the understanding of issues related to the making of the law.
Legislative histories may be used to discover the legislative intent behind a specific law and to aid in the teaching of legislative process to law school and main campus students. The histories also offer insight into laws of general interest to political science, government, and U.S. history researchers, as well as to students preparing for careers in public health, education, business, or any other discipline subject to federal regulation.
Improve understanding of the legislative process
Librarians and professors use our Legislative Process tool to explain how a specific bill became law.
Discover legislative intent behind the law
Follow the discussion, debate, and analysis that goes on as lawmakers consider the bills that eventually become law.
Professionally trained researchers compile and index the histories
18,000 professionally researched histories of laws enacted from 1929-2012 and an additional 9,000 laws enacted prior to 1929 are included in this collection, and are compiled to our highly regarded standards. Starting in 2013, Legislative histories are added each year and are sold as separate add-on modules to the core product.
Retrieve targeted results using unique subject term look-up feature
The dynamic subject term look-up feature allows users to browse or search for terms. Once a term is selected, this feature will display all additional terms that can be combined with the subject term to achieve a result. This feature also indicates the number of laws that can be retrieved for each term selected and each additional term.
Understand the historical context of U.S. laws
Historical context fact sheets help students understand the social, political, and economic context at the time each law was enacted. Organized by Congress, these fact sheets include historical background, war or peace, economic trends and conditions, and current events, as well as lists of major treaties, landmark Supreme Court decisions, constitutional amendments, and major laws.
Let the past inform the future
ProQuest Legislative Insight is a federal legislative history service that makes available professionally researched compilations of digital full-text congressional publications relevant to enacted U.S. public laws, allowing students to gain a better understanding about their nation’s past to help them become informed citizens of the future.
Citation checker and popular name look-up for legal researchers
Legal researchers who know either a public law number, Statutes at Large citation, or enacted bill number can easily retrieve the other two numbers simply by entering the one numeric citation they do have. The popular names look-up facilitates search by including not only official popular names, but also unofficial, commonly used names which a researcher might want to use to search.
Understand opposing views
Undergraduate students understand opposing views expressed in the decision making that led up to enactment of important laws, such as the Social Security Act or the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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