Legislation is a primary source of legal information published by government bodies, setting out the laws that apply in that country/jurisdiction. Legislation is usually debated in Parliament by elected officials and may go through various committee stages which will scrutinise the content of the draft legislation before being passed into law.
When researching legislation it is important to be aware of which parliament passed the legislation and the jurisdiction to which it applies, for example did it originate from the UK parliament, the Scottish Parliament or another devolved government? This will impact on where and how you search for the legislation, and will also provide you with different options for analysing the context in which the legislation was passed e.g. Hansard or Scottish Parliamentary debates.
While up-to-date legislation is available openly for the UK via the legislation.gov.uk website, searching for legislation on Westlaw has the additional benefit of providing up-to-date consolidated versions which incorporate amendments, have status indictors to help ascertain is the legislation is currently in force, has annotations highlighting relevant explanatory notes, case comments and 'Pepper v Hart' notes, as well as linking to other primary and secondary sources discussing the legislation.
The following video provides information on researching legislation, including a demonstration of legal databases. A link to the transcript of this video can be found here.
If prompted to login, choose SIGN IN, then scroll down to ACCESS THROUGH ACADEMIC INSTITUTION, choose University of Dundee, and login as usual with your University of Dundee username and password. Westlaw includes a wide range of legal materials, covering cases and legislation for the UK and numerous other jurisdictions. Westlaw International resources are now held on a separate database called Westlaw international.
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This link opens in a new windowBy looking at the discussions and reports produced by Parliament during the passage of a Bill, we can glean important insights into the policy reasons for the legislation and also why certain wording choices were made. We can locate UK Parliamentary debates online via Hansard and Committee reports are also available online albeit from 2006/7 onwards only. Information about the passage of Acts of the Scottish Parliament are available via the Scottish Parliament website.
Looking for information about the passage of older Acts can be tricky and we recommend getting in touch with the Library for assistance if this is something you are trying to research.
Full-text access to government documents from 1688-2003, with information on social, political, economic and foreign policy. Includes Bills, House Papers and Command Papers, including reports of committees and commissions, accounts and financial returns, statistical information, treaties and foreign correspondence