Winter 2025 US Legal Research Update

Belated Happy New Year’s wishes. Things are not looking so happy in the US government so far. Many Civil Service employees are being laid off and/or paid to retire. Information is disappearing or being rewritten on many agency webpages. I just checked out the Department of Justice website that does appear to be reporting business as usual so far. I also found an Associated Press report about why some of the agency webpages went dark in February after an executive order on January 20^th. A follow up AP report on February 12 stated that some health agencies had restored several webpages and datasets as required by a ruling by a federal judge.

The librarians at the Law Library of Congress continue to post in their blog In Custodia Legis. On January 31 they posted about statute compilations in Congress.gov. “A Statute Compilation consists of its original act plus amendments made to such act (if any) from subsequently enacted public law(s). Every compilation amended by at least one additional law has a currency note indicating the last update. An overall currency note indicates the latest enacted law through which all compilations have been updated, which helps users know how up-to-date a compilation is compared to a recently enacted law. Despite their similar name, Statute Compilations are different from Statutes at Large.” “From the Congress.gov homepage, you can access Statute Compilations by clicking on the link under “Bill Searches and Lists”, just below the search bar on the right side. Today, we are highlighting easier access to Statute Compilations on GovInfo. Stay tuned, though, as we explore the possibility of incorporating Statute Compilations into Congress.gov as a future enhancement. Happy searching!”

On January 12^th Jennifer Gonzalez posted that three new foreign legal gazette collections had been added to their website for Grenada, Italy and Saskatchewan, Canada.

“The new collection of the Government Gazette of Grenada includes 359 gazette issues in English spanning 2015-2021. The gazette includes main issues as well as extraordinary issues, which are supplementary editions to the main gazette that can be published any day of the week. All PDFs in the Grenada collection are full-text searchable so users can search across the collection to connect with issues of research interest to them, such as searching for the term Carriacou Police (a policing service in the Northern District area of Grenada) in the website’s search box.

The Grenada government gazette promulgates legislation and covers a broad range of legal topics related to government action and regulation, including for example parliamentary election results, civil procedure rules, trademark registrations, and more. For users searching for specific government notices in gazette issues, we suggest searching by citation or using a person or organization’s name, occupation, date, or the short or long title of the act.

The new collection of the Official Gazette of the Italian Republic includes 1,062 issues in Italian, spanning 2019-2023. The Italian gazette collection contains main issues, supplements, and monthly indexes called indici mensili. After over a century of this gazette being published under varying titles including Gazzetta Piemontese, Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno, and Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, the newspaper would officially become the Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana in 1946, after Italy’s historical institutional referendum on June 2, 1946, to transition from the Kingdom of Italy’s constitutional monarchy into a parliamentary republic.

All PDFs in the collection are full-text searchable so users can search for terms in the native Italian language, such as Tribunale Amministrativo Regionale (Giustizia Amministrativa), which refer to the regional administrative court bodies that judge appeals lodged by citizens and organizations against Public Administration acts.

Title page of the gazette from Saskatchewan, Canada, The Saskatchewan Gazette.

Finally, the new collection of The Saskatchewan Gazette includes 150 issues in English, spanning 2019-2022. This gazette collection includes government notices, orders in council, and private notices required to be published by statute. Like the previous gazettes mentioned, all PPDFs are full-text searchable, so users can search for the term Assiniboia for example, which is a Canadian town in Saskatchewan whose name originates from the Assiniboine First Nations people.

Saskatchewan is a subnational jurisdiction in the country of Canada, and gazettes are released at both the federal and provincial levels. Today, Canada is made up of 10 provinces and three territories in total. The Law Library has plans to release issues from additional Canadian provinces in the future, subject to copyright restrictions.”