{"id":307,"date":"2012-10-25T19:12:51","date_gmt":"2012-10-25T23:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/?p=307"},"modified":"2013-09-20T19:15:19","modified_gmt":"2013-09-20T23:15:19","slug":"legislative-history-four-steps-to-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/2012\/10\/25\/legislative-history-four-steps-to-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Legislative History: Four Steps to Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stack+of+books\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by: Judy Hale Reed, Staff Writer<\/p>\n

When I saw how excited Duquesne Law 2L Daniel Conlon was, in the law library of all places, I had to find out why.<\/p>\n

When Daniel laid out his recent research victory, accomplished with initial guidance from Associate Library Director Dittakavi Rao, my interest was piqued.\u00a0 Daniel wanted to get the legislative intent behind a Pennsylvania statute for the history section of his Duquesne Business Journal<\/i> case note, which is on a case about notice in a mortgage foreclosure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis [process] is a little gem,\u201d Daniel said.\u00a0 He had seen legislative intent used in judge\u2019s opinions and wondered where to find it.\u00a0 \u201cWe are walking through history to read how laws evolved and how pieces of legislation were born.\u201d\u00a0 This was not the first time Daniel had experienced an up-close view of legislative history.\u00a0 He spent his first year after undergrad as a staff assistant on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

Daniel\u2019s secret path through the stacks involved four steps through four shelves on the first floor of the Duquesne Law Library.\u00a0 He first looked up the statute cited in the case.\u00a0 The Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes Annotated (Purdon\u2019s Pa. C.S.A.<\/i>) contains the codified law organized by chapter and statute number.\u00a0 Daniel went straight to the end of the Housing Agency Law entry to find the Public Law year and number.\u00a0 \u201cThis is where the game started,\u201d Daniel said.<\/p>\n

Moving on to step two, he carried the first book with him and walked one shelf over to the Public Laws of Pennsylvania<\/i> books.\u00a0 Daniel pulled down the edition for the relevant year and turned to the page number, which is also the number of the public law.\u00a0 The public law contained an addition, the Housing Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program (HEMAP).\u00a0 This emergency law passed in 1983 when Pittsburgh was leading the region into the Rust Belt era. It regulated notice and other lender requirements before foreclosing on homeowners.\u00a0 We could see that the law had been amended five times, most recently in 2008\u2014another big recession year.<\/p>\n

The third step involved an older-looking book, the History of House Bills<\/i>, also organized by year and then by bill number.\u00a0 \u201cThis is like the docket of the case,\u201d Daniel explained, \u201cas if it were in the blender.\u201d\u00a0 It was in courier font and listed dates of actions on the bill.<\/p>\n

We picked a date to find in the Legislative Journal<\/i>, which is also organized by date.\u00a0 This was step four.\u00a0 Daniel explained that this was the daily written record of the \u201cdiscussion and debate of the policies behind our laws.\u201d\u00a0 The blender analogy began to fit for research as well, because finding the substantive debate involved searching for the bill number within a date for different dates. This was a time intensive back-and-forth between the House Bills<\/i> volume and the Journal<\/i> volume, but Daniel found the debate he sought and was able to draft a more robust and interesting case note.<\/div>\n


\n<\/b> A Review of the Four Steps to Research Legislative History:<\/b>
\n1. Look up a statute in Purdon\u2019s Pa. C.S.A.<\/i> to find the Public Law number (P.L.)
\n2. <\/i>In the Laws of Pennsylvania<\/i>, by year, find the year of the Public Law.\u00a0 The Public Law number itself is the page number in its respective volume; this will give the bill number for the Pennsylvania House or Senate
\n3. The History of House Bills<\/i>, or the History of Senate Bills<\/i>, organized by year and then bill number.\u00a0 Using the bill number, look up the debate.
\n4. Using the House or Senate bill number, look up the dates on which the bill was debated in the Legislative Journal<\/i>, which is also organized by date.\u00a0 On a specific date, the bills were not necessarily debated in numerical order, so look through the record for a given date to find the bill and then read to determine if the discussion went to the substantive policy or was procedural.<\/p>\n

Judy Hale Reed is a second year student at Duquesne. She had a pre-law career in international human rights focused on gender equality and anti-trafficking in persons, speaks Romanian, and sometimes bikes to school.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by: Judy Hale Reed, Staff Writer When I saw how excited Duquesne Law 2L Daniel Conlon was, in the law library of all places, I had to find out why. When Daniel laid out his recent research victory, accomplished with initial guidance from Associate Library Director Dittakavi Rao, my interest [\u2026] <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-juris-blog","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.law.duq.edu\/juris\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}