Legal Research Video Tutorials: Legislation Research

Research legislation is more than just locating the right legislation. Once you have identified the relevant statutes and legislation for your research, you may need to research how the provisions have been applied in cases, and how it might be interpreted properly. Therefore, statutory interpretation research is an important component of legislation research. 

Typically, these types of documents are used in interpreting statutes and regulations: 

• Legislative background: include preambles of the statutes, drafting bills, parliamentary debates when the bills were discussed, special legislative committee reports where the drafting bills have been studied in detail. 
• Juridical considerations: how has the provision been interpreted and applied by judges in their judgements. 
• Legislative history: how has the statute been amended in the past.