This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. We have received a number of questions about congressional committee prints in the context of compiling a federal legislative history. First, it helps to understand what congressional committee prints are and how they can be helpful for legislative researchers. Congressional committee …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. Compiling a federal legislative history may seem daunting, but it does not have to be. We hope, through our last few Beginner’s Guides, that we have made this process easier for researchers. There is another, possibly less complicated, option for finding …
We here at the Law Library of Congress are excited to learn that the Harvard Law School Library and the legal research platform, Ravel, are teaming up to scan and make available online 40 million pages of American caselaw from Harvard’s vast collection. The best part is that this content will be made freely available, …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. To continue our Beginners Guide series on legislative history documents, we next turn to congressional committee reports. The reports created by the committees of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate are important sources for determining legislative intent, …
We are excited to announce a new addition to our Indigenous Law Portal – Mexico! Thanks to the hard work of many interns, Jennifer, Tina, Jolande, Robert, and others around the Library, this completes the North American portion of the Indigenous Law Portal. The Indigenous Law Portal, which debuted in July of 2014, combines historical information from the …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. In 1947, aviation and film industry executive Howard Hughes testified before a hearing of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. The hearings that followed were contentious, with the committee investigating Kaiser-Hughes Aircraft for receiving taxpayer dollars for …
On May 1, 1915, the RMS Lusitania set sail from New York City to Liverpool, England, carrying 1,959 passengers. On May 7, 1915, the ship was sailing off the Irish coast when a German U-Boat, U-20, fired a torpedo that sank the Lusitania within twenty minutes, killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 Americans. The sinking of …
The following is a guest post by Shameema Rahman, a senior legal research specialist in our Public Services Division. The Convention on International Civil Aviation (also known as the Chicago Convention) was signed on December 7, 1944, by 52 countries. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was officially established on April 4, 1947, following the …