Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Parks on the Mississippi Legislative History Project

About a year ago, Nick Parrillo put up a guest post here that commenced, “The biggest obstacle to writing American legal history, in my view, is the dearth and inaccessibility of records of state legislative deliberations.”  Now comes Stephen Parks, Mississippi College School of Law, and his SSRN paper Bringing Mississippi's Government into the Homes of its Citizens: The Mississippi College Law Library's Legislative History Project, which appeared in Mississippi Libraries 76 (2013).  Here is the abstract:    
In an effort to promote and describe the Legislative History Project, this short article is divided into three sections. The first section will discuss the lack of legislative history materials in the state of Mississippi. The second section will discuss the recent history of live webcasting of the Mississippi Legislature. Lastly, the third section will introduce and describe in great detail the Legislative History Project and its usefulness to not only the legal profession in Mississippi but also to the ordinary citizen interested in the workings of state leaders.