Legislative Tools for the Road

1. House legislative database
2. Will T. Bill
3. LegiSlate Gopher
4. Thomas
5. GPO Access
6. LC Web
7. University of Michigan Legislative page

1. Internet Law Library
2. Villanova WWW Law
3. Emory Law School
4. Cornell Law School

1. USC at the House
2. USC experimental server
3. USC at GPO
4. USC at Cornell

1. University of Michigan Laws and Regulations page
2. Searching Public Laws on GPO

Jump to the bottom of this page.

Legislative Resources

House Legislative Database

See also the Federal Tool Kit's more complete description of this ambitious project: a fully searchable database of House bills and amendments in full text; bill and amendment status, bill summaries, and histories; committee hearing transcripts, votes, and reports; the Congressional Record; etc. Many of the databases, however, especially those that would yield the most current and timely information, remain permanently "under construction" and unavailable.

The House gopher describes the House WAIS databases as follows: The U.S. House of Representatives is now providing the full text of the printed versions of House bills and resolutions on a WAIS server.The Legislative Resources area also contains listings of major Floor and Committee actions taken in the House and Senate, as well as Joint Committees, for the last three legislative days. It is updated only when the House is in session, so will not include Committee actions taken during recess. The Joint Committee Actions includes information for the last three legislative days on which Joint Committees met and acted.
http://www.house.gov/Legproc.html >

Will T. Bill

The "Will T. Bill" interface to the House WAIS server (legislative database) is usually available from 6AM to 1AM EST. It provides an easy one-stop search of many aspects of House bills: one may search any bill from the 104th or 103d Congress, limit the search to particular versions (any, engrossed, enrolled, reported, introduced) of bills or to particular kinds (HR, HRes, HConRes, Hjnt Res, S, Sres SConRes, SJntRes, any), and search by bill number or title, by date of introduction, sponsor or key word or phrase in the full text of the bill. Beware, however: the interface requires a WAIS-conversant browser, or a browser with a local WAIS client configured.
http://www.unipress.com/will-t-bill.html

The LegiSlate gopher

Provides quick and timely access to very frequently (daily) updated information about current legislation. Legislate is a commercial product, a subset of the larger Legislate database. As such, unfortunately, it makes only a smaller subset still available to the general public.

A full description is available in the Federal Toolkit. Those with institutional access to the full LegiSlate gopher service may view a description from LegiSlate itself; those without may prefer to look at their description of the public portion.
gopher://gopher.legislate.com:70/11/Legislation

THOMAS

The premiere legislative resource, containing the searchable full text of current legislation, bill summaries and histories (both searchable), indexes of "hot" legislation, and browsable lists of bills by date, status (vetoed, passed, enrolled), etc., as well as a searchable text of the Congressional Record. Various guides are available, including hints for searching bill summary and status information; a guide to keyword searching; a guide to interpreting results; and a guide to searching for individual bills by bill number. There is also a fairly comprehensive guide in the Federal Tool Kit.
(http://thomas.loc.gov)

GPO Access Legislative Databases

The main legislative databases at GPO Access include (linked here to the relevant pages of the Federal Tool Kit):
The Congressional Record and CR Index
United States Code
Public Laws
Bills
Congressional Directory
House and Senate Calendars
History of bills.

The last contains the 1996 History of Bills and Resolutions, a section of the 1996 Congressional Record Index (Vol.142) that provides information about all bills and resolutions introduced during the 2nd session of the 104th Congress. The database is updated daily, usually the day after publication of the record. The 1995 and 1994 History of Bills and Resolutions database provides information about the 104th Congress 1st session and the 103d Congress 1st and 2nd session. Entries for each bill include actions that are reported in the Congressional Record and reference issue and date and pages where the action is reported.

LCWEB

A good survey of legislative sites from the Library of Congress. Includes a subsection devoted to Congressional sources in particular, and links to CapWeb, Thomas, various partisan and official legislative sources, voting record sources, etc. A fairly small but well maintained site.
http://lcweb.loc.gov/global/legislative/

University of Michigan Legislation Page

From the Documents Center, a comprehensive guide to Federal Legislation information on line (and some off). To this site might be compared the set of general laws and legislation links from the University of Colorado Boulder (mostly GPO Access mirrors, Thomas, Project Vote Smart, Cornell Law School, etc.), as well as the Colorado page of political campaign material, voting records, current bills, congressional directories, etc.
http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/fedlegis.html

Judicial Information

Only occasionally of use to the legislative craftsman, Federal judicial information merits mention of only four of the most important sites.

US House of Reps Internet Law Library

Contains U.S. Federal laws (arranged by original published source), U.S. Federal laws (arranged by agency), U.S. state and territorial laws, Laws of other nations, Treaties and international law, Laws of all jurisdictions (arranged by subject), Law school law library catalogues and services, Attorney and legal profession directories, Reviews of law books. This directory was developed by House Information Resources (H.I.R.) as part of a demonstration project for the Office of the Legislative Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives. The purpose of these directories is to provide easy access to the law-related resources of the Internet. These directories include over 1,600 links to the law resources of the Internet (Congressional Record included).
(http://www.pls.com:8001/his/1.htm)

Federal Court WWW Archives

Only remotely relevant to making laws, the courts are very relevant to interpreting them. This site includes slip decisions from the circuit court of appeals, plus a very few district courts and the supreme court. Most of circuit court links are to the Emory site (http://www.law.emory.edu/6circuit/ etc.), which (in the case of the sixth circuit, e.g.) enables one to find (e.g.) the full decision in the recent Princeton Univ. Press et al v. MDS, Inc. Ann Arbor. Also links to relevant agencies (Sentencing commission, Judicial Center, etc.) and to WANT Inc., a company that publishes guides to the US Court system. Catalogues of their materials are available, plus a few on-line resources (list of recent judicial appointments and vacatings of judgeships a directory of courts by state + special courts including lists of justices plus addresses and phone numbers. More useful for those trying to understand the interpretation of current legislation than seeking to influence the creation of new legislation.
(http://www.law.vill.edu/Fed-Ct/fedcourt.html)

Emory's Federal Court Finder

The emory site is arranged by circuit with a nice map of the circuits, Boolean search by keyword, or alphabetical listing by first or second parties, or list by month of decision.
http://www.law.emory.edu/FEDCTS/

Legal Information Institute (Cornell)

Contains a searchable list of Supreme Court decisions since 1990. A very nice site, searchable by topic, keyword, or name of either party (the last only within individual years 1990-1995 only), plus selected pre-90 cases. The larger Cornell site of which this is a part is one of the chief repositories of U.S. law on line.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/

Existing Law: Some US Law Code (USC) sites

U.S. Code Gopher

The U.S. House of Representatives gopher server hosts this text version of the USC, broken down by USC title (or access via the web.) There is no search mechanism: just begin with the

Experimental House USC Server

The experimental nature of the server appears to lie not in the text (which is that of the January 1993 edition of the USC, as is explained on a brief page, but in its search software from Personal Librarian, which allows a choice of search between "search" and "concept search," and a choice of "advisors" between "relate," "dictionary," and "fuzzy," these terms roughly explained by PLS, and more thoroughly with a Help page, but most simply by trying it out. The "advisors" suggest lists of terms to add to the query on the basis of spelling, association in the database, etc. Final search results are relevancy ranked and ordered, and link to the relevant portions of the full text of the USC.
http://www.pls.com:8001/his/usc.html

US Code at GPO Access

The United States Code is prepared and published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives' and contains the general and permanent laws of the United States in effect as of January 1994 or January 1995 depending on the title. The database is updated periodically, annotating changes to individual sections. Whole titles are superseded annually as the editing process for each title is completed. Notification of a change to a section of the United States Code usually occurs within five business days of the enactment of the law; the text of a revision is incorporated as the annual bound volumes are published.

Follow this link to the longer discussion of the Government Printing Office GPO Access site contained on the Federal Took Kit "General Purpose Tools" page. Or connect directly to the main GPO site, or view hints to searching the USC on GPO.

US Code at Cornell Law School

USC text of January 1994, representing the codified law in force at that time, searchable by popular title, USC title/section, or full text keyword.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/index.html

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Other Current Law

University of Michigan Law and Regulations page

: An excellent annotated list of the chief sources of ready access to Federal laws and regulations.
http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/fedlaws.html

Public Laws

Updates to the US Code can be made by attention to the bills that are enacted as Public Laws. The GPO Public Laws database (limit search to P.L. database) can be searched by subject or PL number in quotes "Public Law 104-17" The Public Laws database is a collection of laws enacted during the 104th Congress (1995-1996). The header of each section indicates when a recent Public Law affects that particular section but the text remains unchanged until the annual revision cycle. Prepared and published by the Office of the Federal Register (OFR), National Archives and Records Administration, each law is first published as a slip law and then later compiled into a volume of the Statutes at Large. The Public Laws database contains the text of each law enacted, and is updated irregularly as the publication of a slip law is authorized by the OFR.

For Public Laws from the 103rd Congress, use Thomas. Follow this link to the longer discussion of the Government Printing Office GPO Access site contained on the Federal Took Kit "General Purpose Tools" page.
Or connect directly to the main GPO site, or view hints to searching for Public Laws on GPO.

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