Barco Law Library: PA Legal Research Guide
by Marc Silverman, Director of Public Services and Reference
Introduction
This article has been prepared to serve as a quick guide to Pennsylvania legal materials. It is not my intent to provide a finely detailed all-inclusive handbook for Pennsylvania legal research. The audience who will find this most useful will be librarians from other states who occasionally must deal with Pennsylvania sources, attorneys relocating to Pennsylvania, and the new law school graduate who probably has had a limited exposure to many of the sources included here. This publication is intended to highlight the most important Pennsylvania sources pointing out their quirks and difficulties to the researcher who already has basic legal research skills. Thus you will not find a discussion of the West topic and key number system or a description of the process of Shepardizing in this publication. Lexis and Westlaw are occasionally mentioned but not really dealt with in any detail. I have arranged the sources into two groups, secondary and primary materials. Because these sources do change in format and content over time the reader should be aware that some of the details I have provided may become dated.Since I originally published this article, the Internet has begun to show promise as a serious research tool. At this time its greatest limitations are the lack of retrospective material and the reliability of individual sites. There are numerous instances of persons or organizations developing a website and then not updating it for a significant period of time. The researcher should always be cautious when using any source, print or electronic, as to where the information is coming from and how up-to-date it is.
Secondary Sources
Encyclopedias
There are two legal encyclopedias covering Pennsylvania law. The encyclopedia with the broadest scope is the Pennsylvania Legal Encyclopedia originally published by West Publishing Company with a new second edition currently being issued piecemeal by Lexis Law publishing. This tool arranges its subject matter into numerous topics which are then further broken down into section numbers. These topics and section numbers do not correspond in any way to the West topic and key number system for digesting cases or to the topic and section arrangement utilized in Corpus Juris Secundum, West's national legal encyclopedia. The set contains a three volume index and is updated with annual pocket parts. Periodically, topics are republished using a revised numbering scheme so it's not unusual to have the index reflect an old arrangement for some topics. When a change such as this occurs West will provide a conversion table at the beginning of the topic. Like most legal encyclopedias, PLE tends to oversimplify things and avoid administrative law. Nevertheless, for statutory or common law problems you can probably get a foothold from this source.
The second edition of the Pennsylvania Legal Encyclopedia is being released a volume at a time and therefore the Encyclopedia will remain a hybrid of both editions for probably two or three years. Major changes are the abandonment or merging of topics, the listing of major law review articles at the beginning of each topic, and the retention of replaced text in a section called "historical appendix" at the end of each topic. An interim index is periodically issued to provide subject access to the new volumes and conversion tables are included with each topic to translate old section numbers into new. Besides being updated with pocket parts both the new and old volumes are kept current with a paperback interim update that contains citations to cases that have been recently published.
Lawyer's Co-op has recently come out with a second edition of it's legal encyclopedia entitled Summary of Pennsylvania Jurisprudence 2d. The subject arrangement is very different from PLE in that it only covers twelve broad topics (torts, family law, property,municipal & local law, taxation,environmental law, criminal law, probate estates & trusts, business relationships, insurance, commercial law, and employment & labor relations ), devoting one to three volumes to each topic. Each of these topics is further broken down into chapters and sections. Besides the standard analysis and footnotes you would expect from this type of work, it also contains illustrative examples, it points out distinctions and exceptions, and reveals practical tips. All of this information is set off from the regular text so that it is easy to spot. The encyclopedia includes a tables volume incorporating a table of cases and a listing of statutes and rules cited in the work. A very detailed index is provided as a separate volume. Lawyer's Co-op has set a new standard for legal encyclopedias with this work.
The Pennsylvania Keystone doesn't really bill itself as an encyclopedia, but this seven volume looseleaf set certainly functions as one. It is a very practical tool covering topics that the larger encyclopedias tend to gloss over. It also contains hundreds of references to other sources that may give more detailed information. Checklists and notations about other tangential legal considerations are handy features of this set. The set is updated by a supplement found in the front of each volume.
Periodicals
The seven Pennsylvania law schools produce an assortment of publications. (see list below) They all produce one all purpose law review, each of which through the years has dealt with a number of Pennsylvania topics. The Villanova Law Review does an annual survey of notable Third Circuit decisions and the Temple Law Quarterly does the same for Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions. Most of these publications have annual indexes in the back of each completed volume. They are also indexed in the Index to Legal Periodicals and the Current law Index along with their spinoff products.
The Pennsylvania Bar Association publishes two periodicals and one newspaper worthy of note. The Pennsylvania Lawyer is a monthly bar magazine filled with practical articles often of the how-to variety. One of the more useful aspects of the Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly is its summation of new developments in various broad areas of Pennsylvania law. This journal also contains scholarly articles of topical interest. The Pennsylvania Bar News is a biweekly newspaper that has several important features. Each issue includes a listing and brief summary of recent state and local federal court decisions. There are articles highlighting different areas of law and practice, and from time to time they publish a summary of state ethics opinions.
The Pennsylvania Law Weekly, formerly the Pennsylvania Law Journal Reporter, is a weekly newspaper that serves a couple of functions. Besides the news articles concerning people or law firms, the newspaper also publishes summations of recent decisions from the PA trial courts and the Pa and federal appellate courts, details on notable awards and settlements, a calendar of events, bar news, and classified section peppered with adds listing forensic and other types of experts. Every January and July they publish an index to the court decisions summarized over the previous six months.
Treatises
In the past decade there has been a tremendous increase in the number of treatises published on Pennsylvania law. At one time the Bisel Co. was the only serious law publisher in the state. Today there are at least half a dozen publishing companies in this market. Most of the standard subject areas are covered by at least one work, with big topics like tax and evidence claiming 4 or 5 major works. Of considerable importance are the publications of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute. Frequently published in a recognizable yellow paperback format, they serve as course materials for the Institute's continuing education programs. Many of these works cover topics ignored by other publications or approach the well-traveled topics from a different angle. Not only are they packed with information, they often contain forms and sample agreements. At least thirty new titles in this series appear each year and many of these are replaced with newer versions annually. For a complete list of in-print PBI publications visit their website at www.pbi.org.
Form Books
There are several sets of form books specifically oriented to Pennsylvania law. Dunlap Hanna Pennsylvania Forms is a general purpose set of form books published both in looseleaf and CD-ROM formats. It includes forms for both procedural and substantive areas. The Pennsylvania Transaction Guide gets the best marks in the business and corporate law area. This looseleaf set also touches upon the estates and trusts area along with some family law. West Publishing has recently (1993) come out with its own small compilation of forms. West's Pennsylvania Forms in eleven volumes covers the areas of civil procedure, domestic relations, business organizations, estate administration, estate planning, employment law, and debtor-creditor law. Purdon's Pennsylvania Forms would at first glance seem to be the easiest set to use, primarily because the set mirrors the organization of Purdon's Pennsylvania Statutes. In theory one should be able to take a statutory citation and look the same title and section number up in the form book set and find the appropriate form. However the set hasn't been updated in years and due to the statutory consolidation currently underway in Pennsylvania this set is at best confusing. Most of the major banks in the state offer will and trust drafting form books that are usually quite comprehensive. These are rarely updated so it is up to the attorney to spot an outdated form. Procedural forms in the civil area can be found in both Goodrich Amram Pennsylvania Practice and Wettick's Pennsylvania Forms for the Rules of Civil Procedure 2d. A basic set of criminal procedure forms can be found in Rudovsky and Sosnov's Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure Forms and Commentary. Darlington's Pennsylvania Appellate Practice 2d is a three volume work that provides commentary, citations, and forms. Another place to check for forms are in the PBI publications and in the looseleaf treatises. Many of the Bisel Co. looseleafs contain an appendix at the end of the volume or set with forms.
Shepards
Shepards Pennsylvania Citations contains the standard features and works in the same way as the other Shepards state citators. It consists of a statutory component and a case component. The statutory volumes allow you to check the history and authority of codified state statutes, session laws, constitutional sections, and court rules. One thing to note is the segregation of the consolidated and unconsolidated statues into two distinct sections.
The case component allows you to shepardize appellate decisions using either the official or Atlantic Reporter citation. This set previously included a volume that incorporated the side reports, but Shepards stopped collecting information on these decisions around 1973 or 74 with the exception of the District and County Reports which can still be shepardized. Libraries that were aware of the elimination of the side reports volume may have held on to it even though its usefulness is severely limited. One cannot shepardize Pennsylvania administrative regulations or decisions. West Publishing has developed their own citator service called Key Cite which while only available through Westlaw provides many of the same services as Shepards.
Primary Sources and Related Tools
Judicial Materials
Pennsylvania case reporters can generally be divided into two categories: appellate reports and side reports. The appellate reports are those decisions from the Commonwealth, Superior, and Supreme courts published in either official case reporters, in the West regional Atlantic Reporter, on the Internet, or in the compact disk services offered by West and Michie. The concept of side reports is probably foreign to most attorneys from other states. The "side reports" consist of the various county reporters publishing trial decisions from the Courts of Common Pleas, the District and County Reports, some sets of administrative agency reports, a few topical reports like the Fiduciary Reports, and a number of miscellaneous old reporters. Side reports traditionally are those volumes of reports not included in an official compilation. In Pennsylvania it is a term used to describe this hodgepodge of reporters.
Appellate Reports
The Pennsylvania Reports are the official case reporters for Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions. The first 52 volumes of this set are nominative reports, meaning that they are cited by the name of the person who compiled the reports. During the early 19th century, case reporting was not administered by the state and was entirely a private enterprise. When the state decided to oversee this effort they had to go back and decide which of the nominative reports they would allow to become part of the official reports. The nominatives included in the Pennsylvania Reports are: Dallas, Addison, Yeates, Binney, Sergeant and Rawle, Rawle, Penrose and Watts, Watts, Wharton, and Watts and Sergeant. Those that were not chosen were relegated to the side reports. They include: Grant, Walker, Pennypacker, Sadler, and Monaghan. There are a few cases reported in these unselected nominatives that don't appear anywhere else, so it's not uncommon to see them cited. There have been several publishers of the Pennsylvania Reports over the years and West is currently under contract with the state to publish them. One anomaly in the set is the appearance of both a volume 81 and a volume 81*, which are different entities. There are no official advance sheets for this set or the other official reports but the Administrative Office of PA Courts website at www.aopc.org loads opinions from all three appellate courts within days of their release. These opinions do appear in the Atlantic Reporter advance sheets generally two to three months after the date of the decision.
The Pennsylvania Superior Court is an intermediate appellate court and hears both criminal and civil appeals. The official reporter is called the Pennsylvania Superior Court Reports and was first published in 1895. It ceased publication with volume 456 in 1997 leaving the Atlantic Reporter as the only reasonably comprehensive print source for these decisions. The Superior Court has its own webpage at www.superior.court.state.pa.us/default.asp which publishes opinions almost instantaneously as they are released. The site goes back to January 1998 and one can search for decisions by keyword or scan chronological lists.
In 1970 the state established the Commonwealth Court, another intermediate court of appeals, to hear appeals in which the state itself is a party. Workmen's compensation and unemployment compensation appeals are heard by this court. Its reporter is called the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Reports. In 1995 the judges of the Commonwealth Court decided to discontinue publication of this official reporter and therefore the last volume in the set is volume 168. Commonwealth Court decisions are also available from January 1997 at the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts website mentioned above.
Side Reports
Many, but not all of the counties in Pennsylvania publish case reporters. These generally include decisions from that county's Court of Common Pleas. These reporters usually are very selective as to which of these trial level decisions they will publish. In some of these reports a single volume will publish cases from a three or four year period. In many of the smaller counties a legal secretary, the printer, or some other person with little publishing experience will collect and edit the material. Consequently many of these reporters are not what one would consider professional products. Problems frequently encountered are the repetition of page numbers in a single volume, variations between the pagination of advance sheets and the same material in hard bound volumes, and most frequently changes in volume numbers between advance sheets and bound volumes. Thus, a case might appear in volume 12 when it is in advance sheet form and in volume 8 when the bound volume appears. It is not hard to understand why Shepards, a system built upon the concept of accurate citation, dropped coverage of the side reports in the early 1970's. West also decided to stop indexing these cases in the West Pennsylvania Digest 2d in 1976, although they still cover the District and County Reports and the Fiduciary Reporter. The District and County Reports is a compilation of what the editors feel to be the most significant decisions from the trial level courts. There are decisions reported in this set that are not published in the individual county reporters. Most of the county reporters do publish weekly advance sheets that are a combination of bar news, dockets, and court decisions. Recently, several of the Courts of Common Pleas have been loading their opinions on websites. Sometimes they are a part of a larger county website or possibly part of a local bar association site. I expect this trend to continue to grow.
Case Digests
For many years the only comprehensive case finding tool available in Pennsylvania was the Vale Pennsylvania Digest published by West. Using the topic and key number indexing system this tool indexed all of the appellate and side reports published in the state. By the early 1980's many of the volumes had been reissued because their pocket parts had grown so large and other volumes were bursting at the seams. West then decided to publish a new digest to contain all of the information that was at the time included in the Vale pocket parts. The new digest is called West's Pennsylvania Digest 2d. It covers all Pennsylvania appellate decisions from 1938 to date and side reports from 1938 to approximately 1976. As mentioned above it still covers District and County Reports and the Fiduciary Reporter. The set continues to use the topic and key number system and contains a descriptive word index to help lead the researcher to the appropriate topic. Other features include a words and phrases volume to locate judicially defined words, an alphabetical table of cases, and a defendant/plaintiff table. The set is updated by annual pocket parts and a mid-year supplement is issued over the summer.
In an attempt to fill the gap when West stopped indexing the side reports in its digest in 1976, Packard Press decided to start a new indexing service specifically for the side reports in 1980. This was a short lived enterprise and the result was a one volume index covering some of those county cases published in 1979 and most of those decided in 1980. After Packard Press gave up on this separate venture they incorporated it into their weekly legal newspaper the Pennsylvania Law Weekly. Every issue contains a section that summarizes recent trial and appellate decisions. In January and July one issue of the newspaper contains a six month index to the summarized decisions. It is an extremely time consuming process to find Court of Common Pleas decisions this way because the index uses fairly general indexing terms and one must go to the individual issues of the Pennsylvania Law Weekly which summarized the case to get the reporter citation.
It might seem like a lot of work to search for Common Pleas decisions and in cases where an on-point appellate decision exists most attorneys will not bother. However, there are several areas of the law, landlord tenant being one, where the amount in controversy is minimal and therefore an appeal is not economical. In these areas trial decisions play an important role. In Pennsylvania, decisions from one county are not binding on the trial courts of another, but can be persuasive.
Briefs
Legal briefs filed with appeals to any of the three Pennsylvania appellate courts are distributed periodically through the year to some of the larger academic and county law libraries in the state. Many libraries receiving these briefs or paperbooks, as they are commonly called, will only keep them for a few years or perhaps only collect those from a particular court due to the tremendous amount of space they can quickly occupy. They are available on microfilm and several Pennsylvania libraries collect them in this format. Generally, briefs are organized by court, then by judicial district, and finally by docket number. In some instances a full trial transcript is made available with the briefs.
Statutory Materials
Pennsylvania's legislature, the General Assembly, follows the standard two chamber format. The legislative term lasts for two years with all unenacted legislation dying at the end of this two year period. The Pennsylvania Manual lists the members of the General Assembly and reports some general information on the workings of this body.
Bills
Bills can be sponsored in both chambers of the Pennsylvania legislature with both the House and Senate numbering their bills sequentially throughout the two-year term. Each bill is also given a printer's number in the upper right corner of the first page. The printers number allows one to keep track of the differing versions of a bill as it works its way through the legislative process. Thus there may be three different versions of House bill 200 with the versions assigned printers numbers 230, 450, and 1378. The highest printers number for a bill will be the most current version of that bill. In Pennsylvania starting in 1999 bills are now available electronically on the Internet at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/session.cfm
Up until this year the state printer published a combination index/status table for bills. This publication is entitled A History of House and Senate Bills. There is a section listing each bill along with the names of the sponsors and a list of printer's numbers for each version of the bill. This section also details each stage of the legislative process the bill has progressed through. The other major component of the History is a subject index for all bills and resolutions. All of the information that was contained in this publication can now be retrieved from the electronic bill room website listed above by using the "bill history" feature which appears once you have selected a bill.
Constitutions
The current Pennsylvania constitution dates from 1873, although it has been amended several times in the intervening years. An annotated copy of the constitution can be found in the first two volumes of Purdon's Statutes, the commercial codification of Pennsylvania legislation. Previous constitutions date from 1776, 1790, and 1838. Among other places, they can be found together in a small book published for the 1967-68 constitutional convention titled Constitutions of Pennsylvania. The debates of the various constitutional conventions exist as separate multi-volume sets.
Session Laws
The Laws of Pennsylvania, sometimes called the "pamphlet laws," is the annual compilation of state acts arranged in chronological order by date of passage. Early compilations of session laws are sometimes referred to by the name of the compiler. Two often cited Pennsylvania compilations which include laws from the late 18th and early 19th centuries are Smith's Laws and Dallas' Laws. Every year either one or two volumes are published, depending on the amount of legislation passed. In the back of the last volume for each year one can find a simple subject index. Since the 1960's the bill number that was assigned to the legislation before passage has been printed at the top of the first page of each statute. The bill number is important in researching legislative history. The prime use for the session laws is in reconstructing the text of a statute at any point in time. By starting with an original enactment and cutting and pasting additions, amendments, and deletions one can determine the actual language in effect at any chronological point. Also included in these volumes are appropriation acts, veto messages, and reorganization plans.
Codifications
The process of creating a consolidated statutory code that has been going on in Pennsylvania for the past thirty years has created much confusion. Before this all started, the legal researcher consulted the unofficial commercial codification of Pennsylvania statutes, Purdon's Pennsylvania Statutes for any statutory questions and double checked the text in the session laws which were the positive law source. At some point in the late sixties the State decided that things would be easier if a codification were the positive law source rather than the Laws of Pennsylvania. Thus the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes were born. In planning this, someone decided that the arrangement Purdon's used in organizing the statutes would not suit the purposes of the new official codification so a new arrangement was proposed. The publishers of Purdon's, West and Bisel, agreed to republish titles in Purdon's to reflect the new official arrangement as the state released the titles in the Consolidated Statutes. Everything would have worked out fine if the state could have published the Consolidated Statutes overnight, but of course they didn't. Thirty years later only about two-thirds of the state statutes have been published in the Consolidated Statutes. Because of this, Purdon's is a hybrid reflecting two different organizational schemes. In several instances there are two different groups of statutes sharing the same title number, one is consolidated while the other is the original Purdon's scheme. This situation arises when the State publishes a consolidated title but hasn't done anything with the material occupying the same title number in the Purdon's scheme.
The advantage to using a codification is the arrangement of all statutes on the same subject together and the constant replacement and removal of text as changes are made. Purdon's adds to this the inclusion of annotations to court decisions interpreting the statute, references to state and national legal encyclopedias, citations to law review articles on the same subject, cross references to statutes in the same area, and recently they have been including citations to the state administrative code.
Access to the set is through a two volume paperback index located at the end of the set which is replaced annually around the time that the pocket supplements to the whole set are replaced. These supplements generally contain the text of new statutes, amendments, notices of repealed statutes, and annotations to cases handed down since the hardbound volume was last published. When the pocket parts reach a certain thickness the publisher starts issuing them in a pamphlet form which then sit on the shelf next to the hardcover volume. Throughout the year Purdon's Legislative Service is published in pamphlet form. It serves to update the Purdon's pocket parts by reprinting the text of recently passed legislation in session law format and recently adopted court rules. The number of pamphlets published by this service is dependent upon the amount of legislation passed in a given year, but usually a pamphlet is published every two to three months. The Legislative Service pamphlets are not cumulative throughout the year, but the indexes in the back of each pamphlet are. Therefore the researcher only needs to consult the index in the most recent pamphlet to access information published in all. Another tool for use with Purdon's is the Interim Annotation Service which again updates the pocket parts by providing annotations which have been decided since the last publication. This tool is issued in September and January of each year. To use it you just look up the title and section number of your statute and any new annotations will be listed. It includes a handy table listing by act number any changes to Purdon's title and section numbers.
There are a couple of tricky situations the researcher runs into when using Purdon's. Very often when reading cases from the 1970's or older citations to titles 12, 17, and 19 will be found. For several decades these titles contained statutes covering procedural and jurisdictional matters and were thus cited to in thousands of decisions. In the late 1970's these titles were repealed and much of this material was recodified and placed in title 42. Title 42 of Purdon's is confusing in itself because it contains statutory material concerning judicial matters, rules of evidence, the rules of civil, criminal, appellate, and magistrates procedure, and the Code of Professional Responsibility. In the organizational scheme used in the Consolidated Statutes title 12 now contains commerce and trade statutes and title 17 houses acts relating to credit unions, while title 19 is not currently used.
Another problem that sometimes comes up relates to the renumbering of sections of a given title. Many of the titles in Purdon's have been rearranged at least once. To lead the researcher from the old section numbers to the new ones, disposition tables are published in the front of the hardbound volumes or if a limited number of sections are affected the table is sometimes inserted at the beginning of a chapter or similar grouping. In some titles the disposition table is only published in the first volume of that title. Recently a Master Disposition Tables pamphlet has been published that collects all this information into one source.
There may be times when you need to convert a session law citation into a Purdon's citation. The volumes labeled "tables", towards the end of the set, will allow you to do this. You must first look up your session law by date in the left hand column. Then locate the page or PL number where the statute begins. Each section listed will have a corresponding Purdon's citation in the right hand column.
An easy way to find a statutory definition for a term is to alphabetically go to the entry in the index labeled "words and phrases". There you will find listings for every term defined by a statute in Purdon's. Also, if you have a popular name of a Pennsylvania statute, the last of the paperback indexes contains a popular name table to provide the citation.
Purdon's has been available since 1994 on compact disk through West Publishing. Besides the space saving ability, this format's main advantage over the print product is the ability to search for text utilizing key words. Although updated disks are issued quarterly, it has only been recently that new statutory text and amendments are added with each update. Previously only new annotations were added with each quarterly release while textual changes were made annually.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that several textual omissions have been discovered over the years in Purdons, some have been substantial. The publisher has made corrections in a diligent manner after these errors were pointed out but I believe it is prudent for the researcher to check the Consolidated Statutes or the Laws of Pennsylvania before citing statutory language.
The text of both consolidated and unconsolidated statutory code sections is available on the Internet here This site has no search facilities so you need to know your statutory citation in advance.
Legislative History
Many of the types of documents that are available for compiling a complete legislative history on the federal level are just not available in Pennsylvania. Hearings are not published and in most situations committee reports are not distributed. Some legislative committees will keep elaborate office files including committee reports, others will give copies of the reports to the state archives, and still others will throw everything away. In the past a few committee reports have been published as an appendix to the legislative journals but this has been rare.
Thus, in most instances the researcher has no option but to look at floor debate from the House and Senate. This is published in both the House Legislative Journal and the Senate Legislative Journal. These publications contain annual indexes, but there is an easier way to access the debate published within. During the course of past legislative terms the state published an index to state bills called A History of House and Senate Bills. Under the entry for each bill is a calendar detailing the progress of the bill by indicating which committees have dealt with the bill and the results of any floor votes. If any debate has been published in the Journals an indication of this will be noted by the statement, "remarks see (House or Senate) Legislative Journal page xx, date". The key to working with this method is knowing the bill number assigned to your legislation before it was enacted. Since the 1960's the bill numbers have been published along with each piece of legislation in the Laws of Pennsylvania. Before this point, one must use the subject index to bills in the History of House and Senate Bills to try and locate the bill number. Starting in 1999 the Commonwealth is no longer publishing A History of House and Senate Bills in a paper version. However, the same calendar and remarks information can be retrieved from the General Assembly's Electronic Bill Room website at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/session.cfm. You need to select a bill, retrieve the preliminary screen for that bill, and click on the bill history link.
Administrative Regulations
The publication of regulations by the various Commonwealth agencies is a relatively new endeavor. While a futile attempt to codify and publish all the Pennsylvania administrative regulations was started in 1946, it was never completed. It was not until 1970 with the publication of the Pennsylvania Bulletin that these important legal materials were available in a convenient form.
The Pennsylvania Bulletin is a weekly publication containing proposed and new administrative regulations, legal notices, executive documents from the Governor's office, new court rules from both trial and appellate courts, Attorney General opinions, and a listing of recently passed legislation giving both bill and printer's numbers. A new volume starts at the beginning of each year and the volumes are continuously paginated through the year. Regulations are organized by the title and section numbers assigned to them in the Pennsylvania Code, the state's official codification of regulations. In most instances new regulations are preceded in the Pennsylvania Bulletin by an agency policy statement giving some information and history regarding the promulgation of this new regulation. An index with both subject and agency entries is published in most years in the issue immediately following the end of each quarter. These indexes are cumulative for the year with the annual index published in the first issue in January of the following year. The Pennsylvania Bulletin going back to 1996 is available on the Internet at http://www.pabulletin.com.
The Pennsylvania Code is primarily composed of administrative regulations, but also contains various court and legislative rules and a selection of municipal home rule charters. It is organized by title and section numbers and is published in looseleaf format. It contains all permanent regulations from all Pennsylvania agencies with one exception, the Department of Public Welfare. Only a portion of this agency's regulations are published in title 55 of the Code although much of the material not included is published in the Pennsylvania Bulletin.
The set contains several finding aids including a master index at the end of the set and more detailed indexes at the end of each title. The volume labeled "finding aids" includes a list of all the state administrative agencies and where their regulations are published in the set. It also contains an authority table listing all the Pennsylvania statutes which authorize agencies to make regulations and indicating where those regulations can be found. Each regulation or group of regulations will contain a source note revealing the Pennsylvania Bulletin citation where the regulation was first published. Authority notes are also included indicating the statutory authority for each group of regulations.
The set does contain case annotations for those regulations interpreted by the courts. Other than checking the annotations to the statute authorizing a regulation or trying a LEXIS or WESTLAW search, these annotations will be the major source for cases interpreting regulations as Shepards does not provide a citator for the Pennsylvania Code.
The fact that replacement pages to be interfiled in the set arrive monthly along with the Commonwealth mandate that each title be updated at least once a year insure that the set is timely. One can determine exactly how up to date each title is by going to the front of the title and checking for a page labeled "transmittal sheet". One can be sure that the title is current up to this date. To update beyond this point one has to go back to the Pennsylvania Bulletin. Each issue of the Bulletin contains a list of Pennsylvania Code chapters affected which is cumulative for the year. By looking up the Pennsylvania Code citation up in this table in the most recent issue of the Bulletin, one can see if any changes have occurred since the date on the transmittal sheet. The only problem with this list is that it indicates changes made to whole chapters of regulations, and is not as specific as individual sections. Some of the chapters in highly regulated areas may have changes every month thus providing a lot of citations to check. However, along with each quarterly index in the Bulletin there is also included a cumulative list of individual sections affected for the year.
The Pennsylvania Code is available on the Internet at http://www.pacode.com.
Administrative Decisions
While a fair number of Pennsylvania agencies have adjudicatory powers, very few of them publish their decisions. Those that currently do are: the Public Utility Commission, the Environmental Hearing Board, the Department of Education (teacher tenure and special education opinions), the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, the Workmens Compensation Board of Appeals, the Unemployment Compensation Board of Appeals, and the Liquor Control Board. Some of these opinions are published by the state while others are published by commercial concerns, with the commercially published sets generally having better indexing and ease of use.
Attorney General Opinions
Prior to 1887 Pennsylvania Attorney General Opinions were not published or even generally distributed. Many of these early opinions have not survived. Since 1887 they have been compiled on an irregular basis into thin volumes and published by the state Justice Department. The most recent volume stops with opinions from 1992. Attorney General Opinions are also published in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. Occasionally an opinion is published on the Attorney General's website at http://www.attorneygeneral.gov. Several multi-year indexes have been published in this century, but the most recent ends in 1953.
copyright 2002 Marc Silverman
Permission is granted to libraries to reproduce this work as long as credit is given the author and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.