Skip to main content

Researching Texas Legislative History Online

Researching legislative history is important in order to determine the legislative intent behind difficult statutory language. For most states, locating legislative history documents is virtually impossible, but Texas provides a substantial amount of information online through the following two websites:

Texas Legislature Online
http://www.legis.state.tx.us/

Legislative Reference Library of Texas
http://www.lrl.state.tx.us/

The goal is to locate the bill file which contains different versions of the bill, analyses, committee reports, history of the bill, and anticipated fiscal impact of the bill. Follow these simple steps to research Texas Legislative History:

1. Locate the code section by using the Texas Legislature Online website and click "Statutes" from the main page. Look for the statement at the end of the code section that contains the legislative session and chapter number.

2. Go to the Legislative Reference Library of Texas website, click "Bill Chapter Cross Reference Table", and select the legislative session and chapter number to determine the bill number.

3. For bills from 1993-present, go to the Texas Legislature Online website and enter the bill number and legislative session to access the bill file. For bills from 1961-2001, you can obtain the bill file from the Legislative Reference Library's site by selecting "Legislative Archive System".

Bill files will not contain transcripts to floor debates or committee hearings. In Texas, such hearings are tape recorded and are available by contacting the Texas House/Senate Media offices. Recent hearings are accessible on the Texas Legislature Online website.

To learn more about researching Texas legislative history, consult the O'Quinn Law Library's research guide by selecting "Legal Research Guides" from the drop down menu under "Research Resources" on the law library's website at http://www.law.uh.edu/Libraries.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.