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Legislative History Research: Illinois

This is a guide to help legal researchers find legislative history to aid in the interpretation of statutes.

Illinois Legislative History Documents

Here are some documents produced by the Illinois Legislative Process:

  • Bills
  • Committee Reports
  • House Committee Hearings
  • Floor Debates
  • Roll Call Votes
  • Laws

Westlaw & Lexis: Westlaw has scraped most of the information you can obtain from the ILGA website including: code, session laws, bill status pages, bill versions. and floor debates. Lexis has the same except floor debates. Both 

HeinOnline: Hein has session laws for most states going back to pre-statehood days as well as historical versions of code. 

 

Illinois General Assembly: The Illinois legislature's website, ILGA.GOV, provides public access to statutory code, session laws, bills status, committee reports, floor debates, and gives directions for obtaining audio of house committee hearings. 

Research Guide

The Illinois Legislative Reference Bureau staff has create this guide to help with Researching Legislative History.