Compiling the legislative history of a statute through finding documents related to a bill’s introduction and passage is a process that may be used by lawyers and judges to determine the legislative intent behind the bill. Documents may be difficult to find or may not provide much information as to the purpose and interpretation of the bill. The resources available vary by time period.

The ultimate source of Iowa legislative history information is the Legislative Services Agency, formerly the Legislative Service Bureau. The Agency provides legal and legislative research to the legislature and drafts bills and amendments. Through the Legislative Information Office, members of the public can obtain the original text of a bill, amendments to it, and the final text, along with information on its status, such as whether it passed into law; which committees are studying/have studied it; and names of sponsors in the legislature. The LIO also has any interim committee reports associated with a bill. You may reach them at (515) 281-5129 or lioinfo@legis.state.ia.us.

Legislative history research may be performed at the Law Library through use of these print resources described above: Code of Iowa or Iowa Code Annotated, Iowa Acts, House and Senate Journals, Iowa House and Senate Bills, and Interim Study Reports. The procedures described below can also be used in the equivalent online resources where available.

It will be necessary to have the number of the bill that you are researching, such as SF 2432, a Senate bill, or HF 2691, a House bill. Bill numbers are reused for every two-year General Assembly session. You may have this from a news item or other source. For bills that have passed into law, you can start with the Code of Iowa. If you do not know the code section of a statute, you can use the subject index to the Code. Under the text of the code section, you will see citations to previous code years that contained it and to the Iowa Acts chapters and sections that created or amended it. The Iowa Code Annotated goes back farther in history in including the Iowa Acts citations, in its “Historical Notes,” than the official, unannotated code does. These notes may also show specifically what language or numbering was changed. You can now go to the given year and chapter of the Iowa Acts, where the bill number is listed under its title.

With the bill number, you can find amendments and sponsors in the House and/or Senate Journal, which have bill history indexes showing dates and pages. The journals do not show any discussion by the legislators so can only indirectly be used to find legislative intent by following language that is added or removed and noting bill sponsors for contacting if applicable.

You can check the appropriate year volume of the Interim Study Reports to see if a committee worked on it and submitted a report. The reports are usually brief. You can look at the bill as it was presented to the legislators, collected in Iowa House and Senate Bills. Many of these contain multiple versions of a bill and amendments. The original version of a bill has an “Explanation” at the end, usually a paragraph or two, which may aid in finding legislative intent. These resources are not available for 19th- and early 20th-century legislation, for which you can track the history but would need to rely on news or other contemporary commentary to learn about intent.

The following chapter is useful for legislative history research on statutes dating back as far as the early 20th Century: