Introduction to Researching Alaska Legislative History Materials

• Publication year: 2011

§ 28 Alaska L. Rev. 279. INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCHING ALASKA LEGISLATIVE HISTORY MATERIALS

Alaska Law Review
Volume 28, No. 2, December 2011
Cited: 28 Alaska L. Rev. 279

INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCHING ALASKA LEGISLATIVE HISTORY MATERIALS

Susan Falk ^[*]

Introduction

For many legal researchers, legislative history is a dark cloud on the horizon, a distant threat that can be avoided if the wind blows just right. Eventually, however, the storm will hit. A case will turn on the meaning of a statute, its intent and purpose, the parsing of a particular phrase. When faced with a potentially ambiguous statute, you may have little option. You need to know how to research legislative history.

Some legal minds doubt the value of legislative history in illuminating the true meaning of legislation. Regardless of your personal view on the matter, you should be prepared to use legislative history as one of many tools in your arsenal, one that can bolster your argument or minimize the impact of an adverse law. Justice Antonin Scalia, who considers arguments based on legislative history "legal fiction," nonetheless dedicated three pages to the subject in his book on legal persuasion. ^[1] Certainly, both the Alaska Supreme Court and the Alaska Court of Appeals consider legislative history a viable source and regularly include it in their analyses. ^[2] Because Alaska is such a young state, there is often a dearth of case law on a particular issue, so legislative history becomes even more important.

If you practice in Alaska, you need to know how to use legislative history and put it to work in the service of your case. And to do that, you need to first understand what it is, how it works, and how to find it. This Practicum explores the basic process of legislative history research, starting with an overview of the required steps and following with more detailed instructions on finding particular pieces of the puzzle. These detailed instructions are organized by the year of the bill; if you're currently researching a bill, you can jump right to the relevant portion of the Practicum for instructions, though the discussion may refer back to a procedure discussed above.

LEGISLATIVE HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL: WHAT AM I DOING, AND WHY AM I DOING IT?

The most common starting place for a legislative history is a statute. No matter how clear-cut statutory language may appear on its face, you can usually find two lawyers who will argue two (or more) different interpretations. Enter legislative history. Most versions of the Alaska Statutes include each statute's history in some format at the end of the statute itself. The official print version, for example, lists the history in a parenthetical, while Westlaw places it under the heading "Credit(s)."

The first task is to determine which legislative action to research. For some statutes, only one session law will appear in the history. These statutes were enacted and have not been amended. Here, no decision is necessary - the enacting legislation is the only action by the legislature. Other statutes, however, may have been amended one or more times. Each of these amendments represents a separate legislative effort, an individual bill that passed through the legislature, the history of which may be researched and compiled.

If more than one session law appears in your statute's history, you first need to decide which session law is relevant to your issue. If you're interested in the general intent of the statute, you might want the original enacting legislation. In that case, your questions are: Why did the legislature enact this statute in the first place? Why did they feel this law was necessary or important? What were they trying to achieve? On the other hand, if you are looking for the meaning of a particular word or phrase, you want the bill that introduced that specific language. This might be the original bill, or it might be a later amendment. If you want to know what the legislature meant by the phrase "excessive force," then you don't need to spend time examining an earlier version of the statute that did not include that phrase.

In order to determine which legislative action to pursue, look up the session laws. A session law contains the text of the bill as passed and is designated by year and chapter number. A brief civics lesson: After a bill passes both chambers of the legislature, it is sent to the governor. When the governor signs the bill into law, it becomes a session law. Each successive bill signed into law by the governor becomes the next chapter in that year's session laws. So "ch. 50 SLA 1983" refers to the fiftieth bill signed into law by the governor in 1983.

If your statute has been amended several times, check each session law in its history to see whether that particular change is relevant to your issue. Starting in 1979, session laws are published in legislative style to facilitate this step. This means that old, deleted language is printed in capital letters in brackets, and new, added language is printed in bold, underlined text. With a session law printed in legislative style, you can tell at a glance whether the amendment matters to you and whether you need to trace the history of the bill.

When you find a session law you wish to research, next find the bill number (remember, before it was a session law it was a bill). The bill number is sometimes called the source and often hides in a string of coded numbers and letters. Within this code lies the basic bill number - a designation for House or Senate Bill and a number (this is the HB or SB immediately adjacent to the numerals, plus the numbers themselves). The rest of the source code may indicate whether any committees substituted their own versions of the bill along the way, which committee's substitute was finally adopted, and whether the bill was amended on the House or Senate floor. None of this information is necessary to compile legislative history; you simply need House Bill 44 (HB 44) or Senate Bill 253 (SB 253). If you're interested in what the rest of the source code means, a key to abbreviations used in bill names appears at the beginning of the Bill History volumes.

For the duration of your research, you'll be working with the bill. Unfortunately, regardless of the bill's length, you'll be working with the bill as a whole. You may only be interested in subsection (a)(2) of your particular statute, while the bill is dozens of pages long and affects an entire chapter of the statutes. It can be frustrating to wade through voluminous material unrelated to your specific issue, but that's the nature of the beast. There is no way to focus solely on one part of the bill. As Chief Justice Walter L. Carpeneti noted in his 2010 State of the Judiciary Address to the Alaska Legislature, the researcher may spend hours "sifting through haystacks of legislative history searching for the needle of legislative intent." ^[3] A large bill makes for a great haystack, a narrow issue a small needle.

Once you have your bill number, there are three general sources to check in the research process-the House and Senate journals, the committee minutes, and the committee bill files. The journals are daily diaries of everything that happens on the House and Senate floor. They are generally bare-boned and procedural, as most of the substantive work occurs in the committees. The committee minutes are the records of committee meetings, hearings, and debates. The committee bill files include everything created or compiled by the committee while considering the bill.

Access the journals through the bill indexes. Depending on the year, the bill indexes appear either at the end of the journal or in a separately bound volume. For each bill, the index lists every journal page on which the bill is discussed. While newer indexes are highly accurate, the older indexes include some...