Legal Research: Pennsylvania

Legislative History

Many of the types of documents that are available for compiling a complete legislative history on the federal level are just not available in Pennsylvania. Hearings are not published and in most situations committee reports are not distributed. Some legislative committees will keep elaborate office files including committee reports, others will give copies of the reports to the state archives, and still others will throw everything away. In the past a few committee reports have been published as an appendix to the legislative journals but this has been rare.

Thus, in most instances the researcher has no option but to look at floor debate from the House and Senate. This is published in both the House Legislative Journal and the Senate Legislative Journal. These publications contain annual indexes, but there is an easier way to access the debate published within. During the course of past legislative terms the state published an index to state bills called A History of House and Senate Bills. Under the entry for each bill is a calendar detailing the progress of the bill by indicating which committees have dealt with the bill and the results of any floor votes. If any debate has been published in the Journals an indication of this will be noted by the statement, "remarks see (House or Senate) Legislative Journal page xx, date". The key to working with this method is knowing the bill number assigned to your legislation before it was enacted. Since the 1960's the bill numbers have been published along with each piece of legislation in the Laws of Pennsylvania. Before this point, one must use the subject index to bills in the History of House and Senate Bills to try and locate the bill number. Starting in 1999 the Commonwealth is no longer publishing A History of House and Senate Bills in a paper version. However, the same calendar and remarks information can be retrieved from the General Assembly's Electronic Bill Room website at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/session.cfm. You need to select a bill, retrieve the preliminary screen for that bill, and click on the bill history link.