Legislative history research refers to efforts to track the progress of a bill through the legislative process and to the examination of documents created through that process. The specific components of a legislative history consist of the bill and its successive amendments, remarks by the bill's sponsors, floor discussion and debate, committee hearings, committee reports and committee prints.
While legislative history research focuses on laws in retrospect, researchers may need to track pending legislation that could impact the law they are studying. Researchers can track pending legislation using many of the same tools needed for compiling a legislative history. Some of these tools are described below.
