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 …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. To continue our Beginner’s 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, …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. Our previous post discussed how to locate a Published Congressional Hearing. In this guide, we will show you how to locate unpublished congressional hearings, which can often pose more of a challenge to researchers new to the area. Congressional hearings have …
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 …
June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride month, and as such, it seems the perfect time to highlight resources that address the legal issues surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation in the United States. While these issues are frequently talked about as if they fall into a singular category, they bleed into multiple …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. As reference librarians here at the Law Library of Congress, we get a wide array of questions from our patrons. One of the most frequently asked questions we receive, however, is how to most effectively find relevant legal resources in our …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. In response to our last post on consumer protection law, we determined there was additional interest in “lemon laws.” Lemon laws are defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as statutes “designed to protect a consumer who buys a substandard automobile, usu[ally] by …
This post is coauthored by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, senior legal reference specialists. Consumer protection touches on a number of areas of law, and as such, has been broadly defined by Nolo’s Plain-English Law Dictionary as “[f]ederal and state laws established to protect retail purchasers of goods and services from inferior, adulterated, hazardous, and …
