**The Repository**

General Information:

You need to use a variety of different resources to conduct legal research or track legislation through the federal process. You should be able to find most everything on the Internet using a combination of subscription databases and publicly available web sites. Some of the sources are official; some are accepted, unofficial, commercial versions; and some may be more anecdotal, like news reports.

Several guides to the legislative process and how to compile legislative histories are available online. A few examples are:

• Legislative Histories of U.S. Laws http://www.gwu.edu/gelman/guides/social/legishistory.html
• Compiling Federal Legislative Histories http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/LawLib/guides/fed_legis_hist.asp
• The U.S. Congress and the Federal Legislative Process http://www.loc.gov/law/guide/uscong.html

The Legislative Process

• http://www.house.gov/house/Legproc.shtml

• How to... find materials related to the Senate and the legislative process http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/b_three_sections_with_teasers/howto.htm

GPO Access:

GPO ACCESS, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html, a service of the U.S. Government Printing Office, provides free electronic access to official information products produced by the Federal Government. Resources that may prove useful in this class include:

• Federal Register
• Code of Federal Regulations
• Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents
• Public Papers of the President

• Congressional bills
• History of bills
• Congressional committee prints, documents, hearings, and reports
• Links to Federal agency Internet sites
• House Journal
• Miscellaneous House and Senate publications
• House, Senate, and Executive reports
• Public and private laws
• US Code

Extensive HELP is provided on how to use the various GPO Access products, don't forget to click on the button.

Thomas - Legislative Information on the Internet http://thomas.loc.gov was brought online in January 1995 by the Library of Congress to make Federal legislative information freely available to the Internet public. Products currently offered by Thomas include:

• House Floor This Week and House Floor Now

• Bill summary, status, and text
• Public laws by law number
• Senate and House roll call votes
• Congressional Record
• Days-in-session calendars
• Committee reports
• House and Senate directories
• Information sources for Legislative Research
• House: How Our Laws Are Made
• Senate: Enactment of a Law
• Summaries of congressional activity
• Historical documents

Thomas also provides HELP through the "About Thomas" and "Thomas FAQ" links provided in the left hand column.

For More Help:

 Academic Search Premier indexes and provides full-text of CQ Weekly beginning with the year 1990. Access is possible with an activated UCF library card number.

CQ Researcher, also published by Congressional Quarterly, explores a single issue each week. Each report is written by an experienced journalist and includes comments from experts, lawmakers and citizens on multiple sides of the issue. Charts, graphs, a pro-con feature, a chronology, and bibliographies are often provided.

One of the most comprehensive free law resources on the Internet is http://www.findlaw.com.

Subscription legal databases include Lexis-Nexis (Academic and Congressional) and LegalTrac.

You may also want to check the Starting Points: Legal Research, http://library.ucf.edu/BranchCampuses/Brevard/guides/legalresearch.pdf, handout and the resources identified by Rich Gause, the UCF Government Documents librarian in Orlando on The Legislative Histories webpage, http://library.ucf.edu/Reference/Guides/legal/leghistory.asp.