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Federal Legislative History

This research guide provides assistance to UCLA School of Law students tracing the legislative history of a federal statute.
URL: https://libguides.law.ucla.edu/federallegislativehistory

What are Presidential Documents?

The President may generate a variety of materials related to legislative bills, especially signing and veto statements. 

Presidential materials are compiled in a variety of sources, including:

  • Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (1929- present)
  • Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1965-2009)
  • Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (2009- present)
  • Title 3 of the Code of Federal Regulations (1936- present)

HeinOnline and ProQuest Congressional for Presidential Documents

HeinOnline has extensive PDFs of presidential materials:

ProQuest Congressional also provides PDFs of many presidential materials:

Free Websites for Presidential Documents

You can also access a large collection of presidential papers for free online:

Lexis and Westlaw for Presidential Documents

Both Lexis and Westlaw provide access to presidential documents. If you have a citation to a specific document, it's generally better to access it on HeinOnline, which is more comprehensive and provide PDFs. However, if you'd like to search for presidential documents by keyword, Lexis and Westlaw do allow you to perform more sophisticated keyword and terms and connectors searching. 

Print Copies of Presidential Documents

Finally, the UCLA Law Library also owns print copies of presidential documents: