New Jersey State Library Public Hearing Collection

The NJ State Library (NJSL) has almost completed a project which involved scanning and creating metadata for several hundred New Jersey legislative public hearings, a project that was undertaken jointly with the Office of Legislative Services and the New Jersey Attorney General’s office.

Public hearings are a way of moving the conversation forward around a particular issue or proposed piece of legislation. When a bill is introduced in the legislature it is then assigned to a committee based upon its subject, i.e. an Assembly education bill will be sent to the Assembly Education Committee and a Senate bill to allocate a portion of Green Acres funding to create inclusive playgrounds will be sent to the Senate Environment and Energy Committee. As there are hundreds of bills introduced in each session not every bill gets a hearing or “taken up” by the committee. The decision as to which bills to hear in committee is decided by the committee chair who is a member of the dominant party in the legislature.

Upcoming notices of which bills will be heard in committee are posted to the legislative calendar, posted as required by the Open Public Meetings Act or sent via email notice to individuals registered to be notified pre-selected bills. Individuals wishing to testify about a bill, either orally or by submitting a written statement, register at the outset of the hearing with the committee staff.

The committee chair begins the hearing by introducing the topic and the individuals invited to the hearing to testify. These are usually government or industry professionals with a deep knowledge of the matter under discussion. During the hearing the members of the committee are able to ask questions of the person testifying but it is not a two-way conversation.

The earliest digitized hearing is from 1938 with the Assembly investigation of alleged fraudulent and illegal conduct at the general election on November 2, 1937, etc. which is a four-volume hearing about election fraud in Hudson County. The committee found “utter and complete disregard of law by local election districts” and urged the immediate installation of voting machines. Charles F. Stoebling, the Hudson County commissioner of permanent registration refused to appear before the legislative committee, pleading illness and refusing the committee access to the voter registration lists, going to far as to have police officers guard the vault in which the records were kept.

Public hearings are one of the ways that legal researchers try to determine legislative intent and so the hearings are cited in the State Library’s popular Legislative History collection. However, not every hearing was always transcribed. With a few exceptions most of the digitized hearings are from the 1960s forward. Older hearings have not yet been digitized but are still available for loan from our paper collection, or we may be able to digitize a hearing upon request if staff time and hearing condition allows. In 1996 the Office of Legislative Services began to create and post born-digital hearings and so the State Library has all hearings both in print and digitally from that time on.

All the digitized hearings are full-text searchable. You’ll sometimes see the note “Copyrighted material removed” in the metadata. Sometimes individuals or groups submit newspaper articles or scholarly articles in support of their point-of-view. As these cannot be posted without the permission of the rights holder we remove them. However, we do have a copy of the unedited hearing which we can make available upon request.

NJSL has hundreds of hearings not yet digitized so doing a comprehensive search involves searching in the catalog, not just in the digital library, as any hearing available digitally will have a link in the catalog record.

More Information

For more information contact NJSL Reference Services.