Reasons for using Legislative History of a Law
Legislative history refers to the process of tracking the progress of a bill through a comprehensive examination of the documents. The elements of the legislative histories include the original bill and the successive amendments, floor debates and discussions, committee reports, hearing, and prints, the bill sponsor’s remarks (Amiot, 2018). The goal of conducting this research is to establish the intention of the legislation as envisaged by Congress. Some of the statutes have numerous ambiguities, which require lawyers and legal scholars to identify the meaning of the applied statutory language (Garavaglia, 2011). The research process of legislative histories is grouped into two, which includes establishing the legislative intent and the status of the pending bill.
One of the reasons that would motivate a researcher to research legislative history is to determine the intention of the legislature. The legislature is a law making body that presumably has its intention when enacting statutes (Garavaglia, 2011). Most of the legal scholars highlight that the researchers should seek general intention rather than the specific purpose (Amiot, 2018). Ideally, most of the statutes are designed to accomplish a common legislative objective to act as a remedy for a given problem. Some of the legal scholars maintain that the intent should be sought on the primary words of the statutes.
Legislative History Research Process
The required documents for conducting legislative history research include committee reports, bills and the congressional debates. The rest of the materials provide little information regarding establishing the legislative intent but provide valuable factual background on the issue being highlighted in the legislation (Amiot, 2018). Researching electronically, the ProQuest Congressional database provides comprehensive legislative history research (Garavaglia, 2011). Using the Advanced Search, one can search for bills, legislative history documents, and public laws.
References
Amiot, C. (2018). Congressional Research Service Products: Purpose and Legislative Histories. Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 37(3-4), 273-308. doi: 10.1080/0270319x.2018.1552054
Garavaglia, B. (2011). Using Legislative Histories to Determine Legislative Intent in New Jersey. Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 30(1-2), 71-84. doi: 10.1080/0270319x.2011.585325