Skip to Main Content

LAW 7222: Comparative Law II: Criminal Procedure: Legislative Information

This guide was specifically created for Professor Turner's Comparative Law II: Criminal Procedure course and was not intended for general use outside of this course.

Federal & State Statutes

Lexis and Westlaw - Both include the state and federal criminal law statutes in their topical databases and are particularly useful for identifying new or amended statutes.

 

Each section is identified by its corresponding public law number and the date it became effective.

 

Both services include the electronic versions of U.S.C.S. (LEXIS) and U.S.C.A. (WESTLAW), as well as all state statutes, which contain case annotations.

Federal Legislative History

If your paper discusses some aspect of a federal statute, you may wish to research its legislative history to determine the intent underlying its enactment. To do so, you may want to review such documents as congressional committee reports, committee hearings, and congressional floor debates.

 

  • Westlaw’s Statutes Plus. Retrieve a statutory section on Westlaw and click on History.  

 

  • ProQuest Congressional Publications (1789-Current).  U.S. Congressional publications, including House and Senate documents and reports, Senate executive reports, and Senate treaty documents. Searchable full text PDF documents from 1789-1969. Abstracts with citations to full text documents from 1970 - Current. Full text available in Underwood's microfiche collection and on Government websites.

 

  • Hein Online U.S. Federal Legislative History Library.  Contains the Sources of Compiled Legislative History Database, a database of compilations for major laws.  Compilations include congressional documents, legal periodicals, treatises, and looseleaf services.  This library also contains the U.S. Federal Legislative History Title Collection, a collection of full-text legislative histories on some of the most important and historically significant legislation of our time.  In addition to major complete legislative histories, this collection includes texts related to legislative histories.

 

  • Congress.gov. Free Web source. Locate selected legislative history documents from the 101st Congress, 1989-90 thru current. Committee Reports available from the 104th, 1995 through current.

 

  • FDsys. Free Web source provided through the US Government Printing Office.  Provides many types of legislative history documents including bills, reports, and hearings.

See Law Library Guide to Federal Legislative History Research for information regarding specific legislative history documents.

Foreign Legislative Materials

When beginning, first check our catalog to see if we have the legislation you need at the law library.

If we do not have what you need or you are not entirely sure where to start looking, spend a few moments examining the Foreign Law Guide. This helpful research tool provides legal research information for numerous countries. Specifically, for each country, the guide provides an Introduction (legal system, legal history, legislation, and judicial system), Major Publications (major codes, official gazette, compilations or official codifications, session laws, court reports, and Internet sources), and Subject Arrangement (alpha order of subjects with references to specific laws, acts, codes in the official sources, and to English translation, if available). 

You also might find it helpful to consult an online research guide on the relevant country for further instruction and detail. 

Lastly, I've included some useful websites below (also see the list under the "Case Information" heading above, which includes databases with legislation for other countries such as China and Israel).