Now, I want to make something clear from the get-go--no one ever said legislative history was easy. Least of all, me. It's detective work, deductive reasoning. It often involves legwork and serendipity. The answers you want are scattered all over, and, occasionally, your resources aren't as forthcoming as you'd like. The recodification project makes a lot of legislative history work particularly murky. It's why you need all this training.
So, what I'd like to do is offer you a glimpse at how a legislative history trace of a random Maryland statute might proceed. I didn't preselect a particularly easy statute, because I wanted to convey the ways in which the resources--especially the Annotated Code--can mislead the unprepared researcher. That said, my hope is that, better armored, better armed, the reader can avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in statutory backtracking.
This summary is designed to help you trace the provenance of a particular change to a state statute. I want to assure the reader that I did not select a particularly difficult statute for the example--the steps detailed herein are typical, particularly where the change dates back to before recodification (in the case of the Election Law title, pre-2001). The backtracking process is methodical--occasionally even tedious--but necessary.
You’re helping a professor with his magnum opus, the Definitive Guide to Maryland Election Law (Warts and All), 18th ed.[1] He is particularly interested in the role of loans in campaign finance, and where the current statute's language exempting loans from campaign finance limits originated, plus any other available history of amendment's passage through the General Assembly. The relevant statute, which provides that loans to a campaign finance entity are considered contributions unless certain exceptions apply, is Md. Code Ann., Election Law, § 13-230, reproduced here:
This part is the legislative history summary:
Roughly translated, this is telling you that the original version is found in the 1957 Annotated Code, at Article 33, §§ 13-207(b) and 13-208, and that it was amended twice in 2002--once by Chapter 291, § 4, and once by Chapter 303, § 2. At this point, you want to look at the amendments in reverse chronological order, starting with Ch. 303.
Our next stop will be the Session Laws 2002, the location of the most-recent amendment.