July 2009
THE ENTIRE LIFE OF A STATUTE, AT A GLANCE
Graphical Statutes® helps you spot the big moments in a statute's life—and retrieve documents right from those big moments.
It's easy to pull a particular statute off the shelf. But what if you need to retrieve all versions of the statute and all legislative history documents (for each version) and then try to understand where the law has been and where it's going?
With Graphical Statutes, that's easy, too.
Graphical Statutes shows you the entire life of the statute in one easy-to-read display, allowing you to quickly see how the statute evolved. At key points in the timeline, links are provided to documents such as the following:
- enacting or amending laws, including prior, current, and proposed versions of the statute
- bill drafts, presidential messages, congressional testimony, and other interpretative aids
- cases that have negatively affected the validity of the statute
The information, links, and KeyCite® status flags in the display are as current as Westlaw®.
Graphical Statutes is currently available for the United States Code Annotated database (USCA) and for databases containing the annotated statutes of California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
How it works
To access Graphical Statutes, click Graphical Statutes on the Links tab when viewing a statute in split-page view or at the top of the page when viewing it in full-page view. The Graphical Statutes timeline is displayed.
The timeline is organized by effective date and tracks prior, current, and proposed versions of the statute. To navigate backward and forward in the Graphical Statutes timeline, click the left and right arrows in the timeline. If legislative history documents are too numerous to fit in the initial display, some of the documents are hidden; click more to view these documents.
To display a cited document, click its link. To display KeyCite history when a KeyCite flag is available, click the flag.