Subject and Course Guides: Criminology & Criminal Justice: Legislation, Policy, and Case Law

Federal Legislation

GovTrack
GovTrack.us is a non-profit that provides easy to use legislative tracking for the US Congress among other congressional activities. Under the “Bills & Votes” dropdown, choose “Find a Bill.” A handy list of select subject areas will appear on the right or you can enter your own keywords.
US Congress legislation information
An official website of the US Congress that tracks legislation and roll call votes. Slightly more complicated to use than GovTrack, but a more direct source of information.
Library of Congress legislative subject terms
The specific subject terms used to describe and categorize Congressional legislation are controlled by the Library of Congress. It may be helpful to browse the list if you are having trouble coming up with effective keywords for your search.

State Legislation

The National Conference of State Legislatures
The National Conference of State Legislatures offers some free databases that track legislation related to specific topics. There are some archived databases as well that might still be useful depending on the topic you are researching. When you run a search, the date defaults to the latest available year. Change the year to “all” to see all available dates.
NCSL list of state legislation trackers
A list of individual state legislation trackers provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures. While information about state legislatures is public information by law, there is no requirement that information be provided in a specific way (such as a searchable website or database). So you will see quite a bit of variety in how information about state legislatures is provided to the public.
Texas Legislature bill tracker
Here you can look up legislation that has been introduced or passed by the Texas State Legislature. Click on “select subject criteria” at the top of the subjects box and it will bring up a list of subjects to choose from or search by other custom criteria.

Courts and Case Law

Sometimes the interpretation of a law, and how it is applied, is decided by the courts and not in any congress or legislature. Nexis Uni provides thousands of records of case law from the Supreme Court and US Circuit Courts as well as others. It also includes information about Congressional legislation.

From the home page choose the “legal” tab. This brings up another tabbed menu where you can initially filter by content type, federal, state, international, or practice area/industry. Because Nexis Uni contains so much information, you must use EXTENSIVE filtering to actually drill down to what you want. However, it is fairly intuitive with a good foundation of search skills. You can always make an appointment with a librarian if you need assistance.

If you are interested in specializing in legal issues for a career, it’s a benefit for you to become familiar with this database, which is the academic version of LexisNexis. Journalists, attorneys, legal scholars, and law makers of all levels regularly use LexisNexis to do their work.

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