Legislative history documents are available from a variety of free and subscription databases. Our Federal Legislative History Research Guide contains a full list, but the best resource if you already know the bill you're researching is Proquest Legislative Insight.
First, find your bill on Proquest Legislative Insight. You can search by the bill's popular name or by citation (under "search by number").
Proquest Legislative Insight features:
- Different versions of a bill as it made its way through the legislative process
- Excerpts from the congressional record
- Committee and conference reports
- Committee hearings
- Committee prints
If you're unsure which document to start with when looking for evidence of legislative intent, committee and conference reports are good starting points. These reports typically include explicit statements of legislative intent, as well as section-by-section analyses of bills.
You can use the search bar under the bill summary to limit results to only documents that include specific words or phrases. Note that this search feature does not generate previews of where keywords appear in each document—it merely excludes results that do not include your search terms.
