BLS Library Blog

If you are researching legal issues related to the coronavirus pandemic, you will definitely want to check out the comprehensive coronavirus resource guide published by the Law Library of Congress, which provides links to laws, regulations and executive actions in the United States at both the federal and the state level, and in various countries.  The guide is updated at least weekly and in addition to direct links to laws and regulations, it includes Congressional Research Service reports which provide information to Congress about the coronavirus, law library blog posts, and articles from the Law Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor which tracks global legal developments. 

Some interesting Congressional Research Services reports listed in the Coronavirus Resource Guide include:

Todd Garvey, Constitutional Considerations of Remote Voting in Congress, Congressional Research Services(Apr. 14, 2020)

Colby Leigh Rachfal, COVID-19 and Broadband: Potential Implications for the Digital Divide, Congressional Research Services (Mar. 13, 2020)

Marc Labonte, COVID-19: Potential Economic Effects, Congressional Research Services (Mar. 11, 2020)

The Law Library of Congress’s Global Legal Monitor has dozens of articles organized by region which track individual country responses to the coronavirus, such as an article detailing Germany’s changes to its rules of procedure in Parliament and one discussing legislation in China that punishes the trade and consumption of wild animals.   

The guide also includes a link to a law library report on Legal Responses to Health Emergencies. Though written five years ago, the report provides useful summaries of regulations addressing health emergencies in 25 jurisdictions as well as a comparative summary and bibliography that may be useful in analyzing the level of preparedness of different countries for the current pandemic.

With paper deadlines fast approaching, many of you may need to identify relevant Congressional documents for your paper.  Often legislative history research is cumbersome and time consuming.  The Brooklyn Law School Library licenses two useful databases to ease this process: Legislative Insight and Proquest Congressional.

Legislative Insight streamlines the research process by digitizing the majority of full text publications associated with an enacted statute’s legislative history.  These documents include all versions of enacted and related bills, Congressional Record excerpts, and committee hearings, reports, and documents.  Legislative Insight also contains other relevant material such as committee prints, CRS reports, and Presidential signing statements.

Unlike Legislative Insight, Proquest Congressional carries documents pertaining to both enacted legislation as well as the bills that do not become law.  This includes the text of bills, transcripts of unpublished and published hearings, Congressional reports, the Congressional Record, Congressional Research Service reports, voting records, etc.  The indexing of some of the material goes back to the signing of the Constitution.   A useful feature of Proquest Congressional is the Congressional Profiles which provide the historical context of each Congressional term, including an overview of party divisions and leadership, economic conditions, conflicts, major laws, Landmark Supreme Court cases and major event

To access Legislative Insight or Proquest Congressional from off-campus, you first need to implement the proxy instructions.

Wikileaks, a website that has been publishing anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents since December 2006, has been described as a Wiki for Whistle-Blowers in an article in Time magazine. Like Wikipedia, the content on the site is posted by users and must be evaluated for authenticity. The site, if used with a healthy dose of skepticism, could become as important a tool as the Freedom of Information Act.

In this week’s announcement Wikileaks says that it has published an extensive database of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. The Congressional Research Service is an arm of the Library of Congress devoted to providing research and analysis on legislative issues for Congress. The 6,780 reports now posted on Wikileaks date back to 1990 and have an estimated value of US$1 billion. The reports may give the public a better idea of the information Congress has had at its disposal, and perhaps push lawmakers into making future reports publicly available.

“Legally, they belong in the public domain,” Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Schmitt said. “It is very important for anyone who is doing research as well as the general public to have access to this information, and see what the congressional research services is [producing].” In the past few years, there has been increasing demand to make CRS reports open to the public. Open CRS is another website whose aim is to make CRS reports public. While it is legal to make these reports public, historically members of Congress and their staffers have done this at their discretion. Schwartz estimates that Open CRS was publishing between 80 and 90 percent of all reports being produced. The reports are also sold by data collection services such as Penny Hill Press.

A number of libraries and non-profit organizations have sought to collect as many of the released reports as possible. Such collections include:

• the National Council for Science and the Environment National Library for the Environment,
• the Thurgood Marshall Law Library University of Maryland School of Law,
• the IP Mall at Franklin Pierce Law Center, and the
• University of North Texas Libraries Government Documents Department

This week, by a vote of 264 to 158, the House of Representatives approved the DTV Delay Act to postpone the transition to digital television until June 12, 2009. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on its web site states that “This delay will grant millions of households the chance to be prepared for the transition and retain access to an important information resource.” The Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D. Cal.), in a statement in support of the bill, suggested that the delay is necessary because of lack of preparation in the Bush Administration:

Unfortunately, we are not yet prepared for this transition. The prior Administration assured the Committee on Energy and Commerce repeatedly that the transition effort was on track. But on December 24, 2008, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) notified Congress that the converter box coupon program would run out of funding the first week of January and that it would need an additional $250 to $350 million to meet projected demand.

As part of the effort to delay conversion, Rep. Waxman sent a letter to his colleagues with an updated list of households on the waiting list, organized by congressional district noting that there were over 2 million households on the DTV Coupon Waiting List.

The conversion project dates back many years and culminated with the enactment of the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 on February 8, 2006 when it was signed into law by President Bush. The multi-year effort was aimed at driving broadcasters from some of the choicest frequencies in the airwaves to make room for advanced wireless broadband services. The Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 was part of a much larger bill dealing with the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

The issue of funding the cash-strapped converter box coupon program, which provides up to two $40 coupons per household for DTV converter boxes (which cost anywhere between $40-$60), is not addressed in the DTV Delay Act. However it has become a point of controversy in the pending economic stimulus bill. Title III of the stimulus package dealing with the Department of Commerce provides for $650 million to be available until September 30, 2009 for the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Program.

As the DTV Delay Act awaits President Obama’s signature, a new feature on the White House web page asks for public input. According to the White House, all non-emergency legislation will be published to the Web site for five days, allowing the public to review and comment before the president signs it. The page, DTV Delay Act of 2009 on WhiteHouse.gov, includes the full text of the bill and offers a form for users to send in their thoughts.

Today, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-2) the first major piece of legislation enacted into law in the new Congress. In his remarks at the signing ceremony, the President said: “It is fitting that with the very first bill I sign – the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act – we are upholding one of this nation’s first principles: that we are all created equal and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness. . . But equal pay is by no means just a women’s issue – it’s a family issue.”

The bill signing comes after lengthy litigation that resulted in the 2007 US Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., 550 U.S. 618 (2007), that reversed a $3 million jury award that found that Goodyear discriminated against her in pay, giving her smaller raises than the male managers. The basis of the Supreme Court ruling was the narrow issue of limitation of actions and that Ledbetter’s claims had to be filed within 180 days of the first time Goodyear paid her less than her peers. The decision became a major issue during the presidential campaign dividing the Democratic and Republican parties. The Democrats viewed the case as an ideologically driven decision — one that tossed aside precedent and logic — and campaigned in Congress to override the decision by enacting corrective legislation. The Republicans (almost united in their opposition to eliminating any time requirement for filing a claim involving pay discrimination and extending an expanded statute of limitations) led a successful filibuster against the bill in 2008 and this year unsuccessfully proposed eight amendments to weaken the legislation.

The passage of the new legislation raises broader questions about congressional overrides of US Supreme Court decisions in general. We generally assume that the courts – and especially the Supreme Court – have the “last word” on the meaning of Congressional statutes. But today’s bill signing makes clear that Congress can act to change or to clarify the legal framework in response to judicial decisions when those decisions have produced outcomes that are not favored by a congressional majority. The BLS library has in its collection a number of items that address the issue of congressional overrides of court cases including these two volumes:

Making Policy, Making Law: an Interbranch Perspective edited by Mark C. Miller and Jeb Barnes (JK305 .M35 2004)

An earlier post on the BLS Library Blog discussed plans by the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to search and seize electronic devices at border crossings into the US. Now, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) has introduced in Congress the Travelers’ Privacy Protection Act of 2008 to ensure that American citizens and legal residents returning to the US from overseas are not subject to invasive searches of their laptops or other electronic devices without any suspicion of wrongdoing. The bill has been referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The bill, which is in the Congressional Record with Sen. Feingold’s introductory remarks, would require customs agents to have reasonable suspicion before searching the contents of laptops or other electronic equipment and sets a probable cause requirement in order to obtain a warrant, while allowing customs agents to hold on to the equipment pending a ruling on the warrant application. Besides subjecting laptop examinations at border crossings to the judicial process and ending indiscriminate ransacking of data, the legislation would ban profiling based on the traveler’s ethnicity, allow the traveler to witness the process, limit the time that officials can hold the traveler’s equipment and provide for compensation for damages to a traveler’s computer. The bill limits its protection to citizens and legal residents of the US.

When the US Congress passed the United States Arbitration Act (now known as the Federal Arbitration Act or the FAA) in 1925, it seemed a good alternative to costly litigation. Before that, the common law rule of revocability (which allowed either party to revoke an arbitration clause before an arbitral award was determined) made enforcement of agreements to arbitrate future disputes all but impossible. The 1920 passage of the New York Arbitration Law, the first American statute to make arbitration effective, led to the federal legislation. Since then, arbitration has had the reputation of being an efficient method of alternate dispute resolution saving precious judicial resources for more serious matters. Over the years, US Supreme Court precedents have given an expansive reading of the FAA. The most recent ruling by the Court was the decision in Hall Street Associates, LLC v. Mattel, Inc. that parties cannot agree to a higher standard of judicial review of arbitration awards. That decision questioned the validity of a long-standing doctrine permitting courts to overturn arbitration awards that are in “manifest disregard” of the law.

For further reading on the topic, see Consumer Arbitration Agreements: Enforceability and Other Topics, by F. Paul Bland, Jr. (Call No. KF9084 .B53 2007) in the library’s main collection.

The internet is bringing increased transparancy to the workings of the US Congress as C-SPAN is now publishing an index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to the site, “the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements.”

The site states that available coverage includes the 108th (2003-2004), 109th (2005-2006), and 110th (2007-present) Congresses. It seems that the 107th (2001-2002) and 106th (1999-2000) Congresses were added in late 2007. Apparently, C-SPAN is in the early stages of populating their content as not all the video is available online yet. Earlier Congresses are expected to be added as the video is digitized and indexed at the rate of two Congresses per year.

Source: beSpacific, dated February 26, 2008