With paper deadlines fast approaching, many of you may need to identify relevant Congressional documents for your paper. Often legislative history research is cumbersome and time consuming. The Brooklyn Law School Library licenses two useful databases to ease this process: Legislative Insight and Proquest Congressional.
Legislative Insight streamlines the research process by digitizing the majority of full text publications associated with an enacted statute’s legislative history. These documents include all versions of enacted and related bills, Congressional Record excerpts, and committee hearings, reports, and documents. Legislative Insight also contains other relevant material such as committee prints, CRS reports, and Presidential signing statements.
Unlike Legislative Insight, Proquest Congressional carries documents pertaining to both enacted legislation as well as the bills that do not become law. This includes the text of bills, transcripts of unpublished and published hearings, Congressional reports, the Congressional Record, Congressional Research Service reports, voting records, etc. The indexing of some of the material goes back to the signing of the Constitution. A useful feature of Proquest Congressional is the Congressional Profiles which provide the historical context of each Congressional term, including an overview of party divisions and leadership, economic conditions, conflicts, major laws, Landmark Supreme Court cases and major event