As the guide indicates, once you’ve found the act, you need to find the original bill number. Full disclosure, my millennial-librarian-muscle-memory took over and I did what I normally do instead of following the steps spelled out in the guide (more on that later).
Strictly following the guide, the way to go about finding the bill number is to consult the Bulletin of Committee Work. There is a volume for each year from 1907 to 2000. We need the one from 1984 which fortunately falls within that time range. Unfortunately, this resource isn’t available digitally (yet), which means you will have to visit a library that has a copy. In the Bulletin, start with the section “Acts and Resolves Signed by the Governor” – this section is tacked on at the end of each volume. Heads up, these volumes don’t have tables of contents, nor do they have any uniform pagination because each volume is a bound collection of the individual bulletins (each with their own pagination) produced by each committee. At least the committee bulletins within the volumes are mercifully arranged in alphabetical order by committee name. [1]
Returning to the “Acts and Resolves Signed by the Governor” section (again, at the back of the Bulletin volume), you will need to look up the Act – in case it hasn’t been burned into your memory by now, ours is Chapter 412 of the Acts of 1984.
The entry for Chapter 412 of the Acts of 1984 gives us our bill number – House Bill 4279:
Once we have the bill number – now we can look up the bill in our digital repository (if you haven’t done so already).
Before we get to the actual text of House Bill 4279, it’s worthwhile to check the information below the Bill number. Here you can find the names of people and committee(s) involved in initiating the Bill. In this case, the committee is “State Administration.”
If you feel so inclined, you can go back to the Bulletin of Committee Work and consult the Committee on State Administration’s bulletin. Senate Bills are listed first, but since we know ours is a House Bill we can skip ahead to where the numbers start with an H and then look for H4279:
If you feel so inclined, you can go back to the Bulletin of Committee Work and consult the Committee on State Administration’s bulletin. Senate Bills are listed first, but since we know ours is a House Bill we can skip ahead to where the numbers start with an H and then look for H4279:
You can then repeat the process for the House Committee on Ways and Means. I’m not going to say that this is an unnecessary step; however, once you have the bill number, you can just look up the bill’s history in either the Legislative Record for 1984 (companion to the Bulletin of Committee Work of the same year) or the “Bill History” section of the Index volume of the 1984 Journal of House of Representatives. These provide a chronology all in one place and don’t require you to hop around looking up each committee and scanning for the bill number. Like the Bulletin of Committee Work, the Legislative Record isn’t online; however, the Journal is.
Bill History – Legislative Record:
Bill History – House Journal:
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| Page 2468 of volume 3 of the 1984 Journal of the House of Representatives |
The condensed information printed in both sources should be the same (it’s always best to double check though!). The abbreviations refer to dates as well as page numbers of either Journal of the House of Representatives (a.k.a., House Journals commonly abbreviated as HJ) or Journal of the Senate (a.k.a., Senate Journals commonly abbreviated as SJ). The first entry, for example: “1/9-HOUSE-Referred to the committee on State Administration -HJ462A” is another way of saying that in the House of Representatives referred this bill to the committee on State Administration on January 9th, 1984 and is noted on page 462A of 1984 House Journal. This glossary of legislative terms can be useful when trying to parse these entries. You can then check each citation in the House Journals and Senate Journals for 1984 to see if there is any additional information.
As explained in the blog post on rejected bills which I mentioned earlier, these histories only correspond to the bill as filed. They aren’t going to include anything before that (even if there were earlier attempts at getting this legislation passed). Depending on what questions you are hoping to answer through compiling this legislative history, you might need to go back to those other versions and repeat portions of this process (see this past blog post for additional tips).
We’ve now reached the “additional resources” part of the guide. I’m only going to spend time on one of these because they are a resource for which we get frequent requests despite the fact that the State Library does not collect them: legislative packets. The State Archives collects legislative packets. These packets contain whatever material is submitted with the passed act to the Archives and they can be extremely useful when trying to figure out legislative intent (what the researcher is usually after when compiling a legislative history); but be warned: these packets are a mixed bag – in any given packet there could be a useful material or there could be virtually nothing (regardless of how monumental the legislation was). The packet for Chapter 412 of the Acts of 1984 was only 15 pages – the text of the bill with some margin notes (mostly corrections) along with signed and dated forms for the various stages of the bill, e.g. verifying that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd readings had taken place.
I realize that this apparent roadblock isn’t the most inspiring way to conclude our search. Arguably we could continue by considering more of the additional sources listed in the guide, such as contemporary newspapers or journals. The bill histories gave us plenty of names and dates we could search. We could also check the Library’s collection of legislator’s papers and see if there are papers from any of the individuals who sponsored or were on the committees involved with the bill. [2]
The exact stopping point depends on the researcher (I don’t know about you but I’ve well beyond satisfied any possible curiosity I had regarding this law). It’s important to keep in mind that this was a fairly straightforward piece of legislation to research, and it still took up a good chunk of time and required outside resources. [3]
I hope this gives you some idea as to the amount of work that goes into compiling a legislative history.
Maryellen Larkin
Reference & Government Documents Librarian
[1] House Rules, Joint Rules, and Senate Rules are treated within the larger Committee on Rules and are organized respectively.
[2] Try not to confuse legislative packets held at the State Archives with the legislator’s papers held at the State Library’s Special Collections.
[3] A special thank you to the archivists at the State Archives for helping me find the legislative packet!
[1] House Rules, Joint Rules, and Senate Rules are treated within the larger Committee on Rules and are organized respectively.
[2] Try not to confuse legislative packets held at the State Archives with the legislator’s papers held at the State Library’s Special Collections.
[3] A special thank you to the archivists at the State Archives for helping me find the legislative packet!
