Dito Legislative Insights - Legislative Search
Legislative Insights provides search facilities for Federal and US State legislation.
Search Type Selection
A toggle switch at the top of the page is used to switch between Federal and State sources
Federal Search
The Federal search form can be used to find documents from the United States Government Publishing Office (US GPO).
The search form supports basic and advanced search modes. Selecting the Advanced checkbox expands the form to show a list of document types and date ranges to include in the search. These are used to filter search results for the search term in the search box. The Include Historical field in the form determines whether the search should return all versions of a document that matches the search condition or just the most recent.
The advanced search form uses facilities provided by US GPO to perform a key word based search for the specified document types, date ranges and version criteria. It is useful when you want direct control over the search criteria that gets used. For example, you may want to exclude Congressional Bills from a search for US Code. The basic search relies on the same US GPO facilities. It uses AI to determine the search criteria. This allows it to perform natural language searches. For example, the search term Senate bills in the last 7 days gets translated into the appropriate GPO search criteria before submission.
State Search
The bill search form uses information from the Open States open source project to find bills from most state legislative sessions in the last 5 years.
Setup
The State form displays a Getting Started form the first time you access it. This form appears when the State search form is accessed from a browser that has not saved an Open States API key. Follow the instructions on the API Key Registration page to register a key.
Notes:
- Each user should register their own Open States API key. Open States only allows 10 requests per minute and 250 requests per day for each registered user. These limits are easy to exceed if multiple users share the same key.
- The API Key Registration page describes the registration process for Open States and Google AI Studio keys. In most installations Google AI Studio registration is optional since it is set on the server.
Usage
Use the State dropdown to select the State you want to query.
This will open the bill search form and select the State’s most recent legislative session. Pressing the Search button without adding search criteria will return all bills from the selected session showing a summary of each bill with links to its versions. Clicking on a link will populate the Bill URL field for preview or summarization.
The search form allows you to switch between sessions and restrict the search by chamber (upper or lower), classification (bill or resolution), sponsor, significant dates or keywords. For example, a keyword search could be for an individual bill HB 3 or topic appropriations. The date fields can be used to search for bills based on their creation, or last action dates.
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