Below are three main ways to search for state and federal bills or draft legislation and laws. Depending on what form it is in, a law or legislation may be called a slip law, session law, act, statute, code. At the bottom of this page are additional links to resources for searching legal contents.
Enter a state name or "Federal" and "Bill Tracking" or Statutes in Library Search and look for results under "Books&Media" or "Journals" for a link to the Westlaw Campus Research database.
Useful information for searching from the Library of Congress
The CRS Legislative Subject Terms is a set of about 1,000 terms, including those that describe geographic entities and government organizations, for use with CONGRESS.GOV beginning with the 111th Congress. Terms assigned to legislation from the 110th and earlier Congresses came from a list that was based upon a thesaurus known as the Legislative Indexing Vocabulary (LIV). Legislative analysts from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) closely examine the content of each bill and resolution to assign Policy Area Terms and Legislative Subject Terms. The Legislative Indexing Vocabulary (LIV) is an older CRS thesaurus that was discontinued in 2008. Terms from all three subject vocabularies can be used to enhance CONGRESS.GOV research
You can search bills and legislation for a state by going to the state government website, which you can find using the State Legislative Websites. If you use other sources, once you have your bill or law, visit the state government website for information and resources.
Note whether the database is (1) Introduced legislation databases, which track all introduced legislation within a specific topic area or (2) Enacted legislation databases, which only include enacted legislation within a specific topic area.
This is not a full-text search. For full bill text searching, select All Bill Text in the menu, and select one or more states as needed.
