Skip to main content

Online Bill Tracking Resources

Since convening on January 6, the 111th Congress has already generated nearly 2,500 bills in the House and another 1,000 in the Senate. How many have become public law so far? About 25.

With odds like those, how can you possibly stay on top of all the proposed legislation which could affect your client’s case, your law review article, or even your country’s official language? The Goodson Blogson investigated some popular free and fee-based online sources for tracking legislation at both the federal and state levels.

Federal
  • THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov)
    This free service from the Library of Congress remains a favorite source for finding information about federal legislation. Bill summary and status information is available back to the 93rd Congress; as well as the full text of bills from 1989-present. Search by keywords, bill numbers, or a variety of other options (e.g. sponsors and actions taken); bills can also be browsed. Bill summary and status reports provide links to the text of related committee reports and debates in the Congressional Record.

    Unfortunately, THOMAS lacks an email or RSS alert feature for tracking updates to individual bill status reports. GovTrackUS (http://www.govtrack.us/) is a free site (registration required) which provides such a service at the individual bill level. OpenCongress (http://www.opencongress.org/), a project from the Sunlight Foundation, also offers free RSS feeds for tracking federal legislation.

  • LexisNexis (http://lawschool.lexis.com)
    Federal bill tracking reports are available on Lexis through the path Legal > Legislation & Politics - U.S. & U.K. > U.S. Congress > Bill Tracking Report - Current Congress. Bill reports are updated by noon the next business day following any action in Congress.

  • Westlaw (http://lawschool.westlaw.com)
    Last week, Westlaw announced the debut of Graphical Bills. Like Westlaw’s popular Graphical KeyCite feature for cases and statutes, Graphical Bills presents a visual depiction of a bill’s progress through Congress. You can access the graphical view for bills introduced after January 2009 by clicking the “Links” tab in a result list. (Check out the example of HR 1913 Graphical by clicking any of the four bill versions, then choosing the "Graphical Bills" link.)

    Other federal bill tracking databases on Westlaw are available from the Directory > U.S. Federal Materials > Bill Tracking.
State

Although most have already adjourned for the summer, it’s worth noting here that many state legislatures offer bill tracking services like THOMAS. Quality and coverage will vary widely by state—the North Carolina General Assembly is certainly near the top of the list with its multiple bill search features and options to track session activity as well as individual bills with RSS (http://www.ncleg.net/Legislation/Legislation.html).

Access the legislature websites of all 50 states through the National Conference of State Legislatures lookup page (http://www.ncsl.org/public/leglinks.cfm). (Select the desired states from the left-hand column and choose “Bills” from the right-hand column to retrieve the links.)

Lexis offers state bill tracking through the path Legal > Legislation & Politics - U.S. & U.K. > U.S. States > Individual State Bill Tracking (Current). There is also a combined database (State Net Bill Tracking - Current Session) which compiles bill text and status information for the current legislative sessions of all 50 states.

Westlaw also offers a variety of individual-state and combined-state legislative tracking databases from the Directory > U.S. State Materials > Legislative Tracking Materials.

Did we overlook your favorite source for bill tracking? Let us know in the comments.

Popular posts from this blog

Black's Law Dictionary 12th Edition Now Online

A new 12th edition of Black's Law Dictionary was published in June. Once the library's hard copies arrive and are processed, you will find a print copy at the Reserve Desk and on the dictionary stand in the library Reading Room. Online, the Black's Law Dictionary database on Westlaw has already incorporated the 12th edition changes. (To access it on Westlaw Precision, type BLACKS into the main search bar and select the source from the drop-down suggestions, or retrieve it from the Secondary Sources content menu.) What's new in the 2024 edition? As with the 2019 update, the publisher promises a revision to every single page . More than 2,500 new terms (such as ghost gun and shadow docket ) have been added, bringing the total number of definitions higher than 70,000. Last month, longtime editor Bryan A. Garner joined David Lat's Original Jurisdiction podcast to discuss the new edition and his editorial process for revising the much-cited source. Of course, w

Free Access to US Case Law

Last month marked a milestone for the Caselaw Access Project (CAP) , an ambitious project from the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab to digitize centuries of U.S. federal and state case law for free public access. Launched in 2016 with the financial backing of online legal research company Ravel Law (now owned by LexisNexis ), the Caselaw Access Project involved the digitization of more than 36 million pages of printed case reporters. The original agreement contained a commercial use restriction for eight years, which has now expired. The Innovation Lab commemorated the occasion with a conference on March 8 , highlighting the history of the project and use cases for the future. For more information on the history of the project, see Adam Ziegler's guest post at Bob Ambrogi's Law Sites . The Search feature on the legacy version of the CAP website links to CourtListener's Advanced Case Law Search , which has incorporated the CAP content. The beta version of the  CAP websit

Winter Break Reading Recommendations

The end of the semester is almost here! Amid the flurry of final exams and the holiday rush, it might be hard to find time for your perfect winter break book. But a good read can help pass the time on long flights or airport delays, as well as give you a great way to wind down for the night at the end of busy holiday festivities. To help you find something appealing to read before you go, here are seven recommended titles that the Goodson Law Library staff have enjoyed recently. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall , by Zeke Faux ( Request a print copy   or put a hold on the e-book !) "In this up-close-and-personal account, Faux reveals the highly entertaining and, frankly, horrifying (for human beings and the environment) worlds behind the current crypto scandals. An investigative reporter for Bloomberg, Faux also manages to make abstruse cryptocurrency concepts digestible here. For my fellow legal news junkies looking for a deep dive beyond the FTX/