California Legislative History and Advocacy

A code compiles all of the laws in force at a specific date.

There are two primary reasons you might want to use a historical code:

• You want to know the law in effect a specific point in time (e.g., the eminent domain laws in effect in 1950). It's possible to piece this information together by comparing multiple session laws, but it's usually much easier to look at a historical code from the right time period. 
• You want to conduct a legislative history of a statute that has since been repealed. Usually, your easiest starting point will be to locate a historical code from before the statute was repealed and then read the statute's history in the historical code.  

Both HeinOnline and LLMC Digital provide selected out-of-copyright editions of California codes:

Because each database provides different codes, check both. 

The law library has an extensive collection of historical California codes in print in the library's A-Level (basement):

Codes are organized alphabetically by name of code and then by date within each code.