Limits on use of the Alien Tort Statute Read More ...

Bipartisan support for S. 47 Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 Read More ...

One hundred years of income taxes Read More ...

Links to some research guides on U.S. election law Read More ...

June 23rd is the 40th anniversary of Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972 Read More ...

Today's filings in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Read More ...

Release of the online C.F.R, and improvements to the online U.S. Code Read More ...

GPO completes move from GPO Access to FDsys Read More ...

Video coverage of proceedings on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives Read More ...

$1 trillion per year in tax breaks, by sector, with dates and details Read More ...

Citation and links to online text Read More ...

A selection of CRS Reports on federal law making Read More ...

A presentation on their origin and validity Read More ...

Wonderful news! The Heafey Law Library now subscribes to a digital version of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set! If you're unfamiliar with the Serial Set, it collects U.S. government publications that were compiled by order of Congress. This makes it a gold mine of information for federal legislative history research! The Serial Set contains House and Senate committee reports on proposed legislation. Many of these reports will contain not just the text of the legislation but a section-by-section analysis of the legislation. Read More ...

New blog from the Law Librarians of Congress Read More ...

Online links to documents since the mid-1990s Read More ...

New resource for finding Congressional Reports Read More ...

Bill pending in the Senate Read More ...

Bill to bar federal employment for tax delinquents Read More ...

Students often come to the Reference Desk with a citation to a House or Senate Report, and then want to know what they are looking for. Here's a list of readily-accessible places where you can find these reports. The list is arranged by the years the reports were published. . . . (more) Read More ...

H.R. 3221 Read More ...

Anti-smoking; study abroad Read More ...

Online text Read More ...

Website with information about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Read More ...

Text and Committee Reports Read More ...

PDF copies of federal documents Read More ...

Congressional investigations are an overlooked source of information for researchers. And how good of a wrestler was Hulk Hogan? Read More ...

From today's Scout Report, a link to UC Berkeley Library's Congressional Tutorials Read More ...

The website for the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, DC is known throughout the law librarian community as a great source for high-quality research resources.  The Society’s Legislative Source Book contains all kinds of useful information for legal researchers.  The Society has just introduced another new site, "Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws in Electronic Format."  The page is pretty self-explanatory; you can view the laws for which legislative histories are available by popular name or by public law number.  For details about accessing the information on this site, see the Society’s explanatory notes.  Thanks to beSpacific for highlighting this item.

A student working on a cite-check asked us to decipher the abbreviations that appear after different versions of a piece of federal legislation in THOMAS search results.  (For those of you wondering what THOMAS is, it’s a Library of Congress website that compiles a wide variety of federal legislative information, including legislation, House and Senate committee reports, the Congressional Record, and more -- most of it is available in PDF format from the Government Printing Office.)  For example, if you search for H.R. 2520 on THOMAS in the records of the current session of Congress, you will see search results that look like this:

1.  Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 (Received in Senate from House) H.R. 2520.RDS

2.  Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 (Placed on Calendar in Senate) H.R. 2520.PCS

The letters that are tacked on to the end of the bill number (RDS and PCS) simply represent the different versions of the bill.  According to the Library of Congress, the meaning of these extensions "is largely explained in the preceding parentheses."  Thus, "PCS" stands for "placed on calendar in Senate," and "RDS" stands for "received in Senate from House."  Thanks to THOMAS for taking the time to create a useful and informative "Help" page!

FirstGov, the federal government's official web portal, has undergone a face lift. It now features a revamped search engine that uses Vivisimo's clustering technology to group search results by subject Read More ...

Thanks to Inter Alia, we’ve discovered another handy legal research resource from the Washington Post.  The newspaper has created a free Votes Database, which allows users to browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991.  You can browse late-night votes for sessions from 1991 until present, and you can also review a list of members who have missed the most votes in each session.  The site even publishes an RSS feed of recent votes by individual members of Congress.  This is an extremely handy tool for anyone tracking federal legislation or the voting record of particular members.