HIERARCHY OF AUTHORITY

LEGISLATIVE HISTORY DOCUMENTS

When courts look to legislative history to explain statutory meaning, they follow a general hierarchy of authoritative weight that should be given to the different types of legislative history documents.

In general, conference committee reports and committee reports are the most authoritative documents for the purposes of determining legislative intent because they are written by the legislators who are most intimately familiar with the language of the bill, and are written for the purpose of explaining its likely effects.  Remember that conference committee reports are especially influential in determining legislative intent because members of both houses will, in the course of compromising on differing language, state their rationales for settling on one version of a bill over others.

After reports in the hierarchy are the variant versions of a bill (when the bill has been amended after its introduction).  Each addition or deletion of text can be viewed as a legislative choice for one meaning of a provision over another.

Hearings, Debates, and Presidential Statements, while next in the hierarchy, should be used with caution and perhaps only when no other sources support a given position.  In each case, the testimony or statement may tend to advance a singular and/or partisan reading of the provision at issue and thus might be inaccurate as evidence of legislative intent.

Committee prints, where available, may also be used. But it should be noted that these documents do not always correspond to a pending piece of legislation and do not always offer the same degree of analysis.

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