Pritzker Legal Research Center: Immigration Law Clinic: Legislative History

Legislative History

When trying to locate federal legislative history materials, first locate the public law number for your act. Use the USCA Popular Name Table on Westlaw and locate the "Enacting Law" information, or use Google. Once you have found the public law number, try one of the resources listed below. Our federal legislative history research guide provides more information about the legislative history research process and sources of legislative documents.:

Legislative History
Westlaw. Includes legislative history documents under specific statutes and the US GAO Federal Legislative Histories - already compiled legislative histories that can be looked up by public law number or searched.
HeinOnline: U.S. Federal Legislative History Library
Library of already compiled federal legislative histories. Search or browse by Congress session, public law number, bill number, or popular name.
ProQuest Congressional
This resource contains PDFs of many Congressional publications. A useful strategy is to "Search by Number" and then enter the public law number for your Act.
Congressional Reports on Govinfo.gov
If you know the citation for a particular House or Senate report, you can retrieve a PDF of the document on Govinfo.gov. Coverage extends back to 1995.

ProQuest Legislative Insight This link opens in a new window
Provides thoroughly researched compilations of digital full text publications created by Congress during the process leading up to the enactment of U.S. Public Laws. It includes only documents related to the passage of a law, so hearings, reports, bills, etc., that are not part of a legislative history are not included in the database. For those other materials, please use ProQuest Congressional. Coverage includes major laws enacted between 1789-1928, as well as select laws enacted between 1929-1965.

Immigration Law & Policy in the U.S. (HeinOnline)
"This monumental collection is a compilation of the most important historical documents and legislation related to immigration in the United States as well as current hearings, debates and recent developments in immigration law. Includes BIA Precedent Decisions, legislative histories, law and policy titles, extradition titles, scholarly articles, an extensive bibliography, and other related works."