Congress at Work: A Documentary Supplement for Courses in Legislation

Casebooks on Legislation typically omit legislative materials, as such, giving students little if any chance to work directly with statutes and the processes that create them. Yet lawyers may become intimately involved in the legislative process, and must often advise clients about statutory meaning in matters of great consequence – long before judicial readings occur, and with only the statutes and any sense they may have about their origins to guide them. This supplement will permit you to expose your students to these primary materials of law, that they too rarely encounter in legal education. For two relatively compact statutes, enacted late in the 19th and 20th centuries, it will put before them the primary materials of the legislative process and set problems for interpretation, with only enough context-setting text (no judicial opinions) to frame the issues as clients might have asked contemporary lawyers for advice about them.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1098/thumbnail.jp