Legal Research for Undergraduates

Where to access legislative materials

The California legislature's LegInfo website provides access to legislative history for bills from 1993 forward.

Types of legislative materials

Major California legislative history documents include:

• History: Lists each action taken on a bill, from its original introduction to its hearings in committees. 
• Bill text: You can better understand the legislature's intent by seeing what text they considered and then deleted and what text they purposefully added. To view the bill text on the current California legislative website:
  • Use the Version dropdown in the upper right corner to trace the text of the bill from its introduction, through each amendment, through the final bill.
  • The Compare Versions tab allows you to compare the version of the bill that you have selected in the Version dropdown to any other other version of the bill.
• Bill analysis: Before each committee hearing and floor vote, legislative staffers write analyses of the bill text, explaining the purpose of the bill, who supported it, who opposed it, and why. The bill analysis is often the best place to get a basic understanding of the bill.

Ballot propositions and initiatives 

In California, statutes can also be passed or repealed directly by the voters through ballot propositions and initiatives. The primary legislative history material for initiatives are the ballot pamphlets provided to voters, which explain the purpose of the law and include arguments by supporters and opponents. 

UC Hastings has an extensive archive of ballot pamphlets:

Where to access legislative history materials

The most comprehensive source of federal legislative history materials is ProQuest Legislative Insight.

On ProQuest Legislative Insight, you can look up a specific federal act (e.g. the National Labor Relations Act) and find a list of all of the legislative history materials for that act, with links to the full text:

You can retrieve even more individual legislative documents on ProQuest Legislative Insight's companion website, ProQuest Congressional:

Finally, you can locate more recent federal legislative history materials for free on Congress' website:

Types of legislative materials

Major federal legislative history documents include:

• Bill text: You can better understand the legislature's intent by seeing what text they considered and then deleted and what text they purposefully added. Because a majority vote is required to add or remove text, bill text is generally considered strong evidence of legislative intent.
• Committee reports: Reports produced by the committees that heard the bill. Because these indicate the consensus opinion of the committee, they are generally considered strong evidence of legislative intent.
• Committee prints: Materials submitted to the committees that heard the bill. Because these represent the opinions of lobbyists for or against the bill, they are generally considered relatively weak evidence of legislative intent. 
• Committee hearings: Statements made by witnesses who testified about the bill at committee hearings. Because these represent the opinions of lobbyists for or against the bill, they are generally considered relatively weak evidence of legislative intent. 
• Congressional Record: Transcripts of debates by members of Congress on the floor of the House and Senate. Because these represent the opinions of individual members, they are generally considered relatively weak evidence of legislative intent. 

Statutes are passed through the following process:

• The statute is introduced as a bill in one house of the U.S. Congress or a state legislature. The U.S. Congress is divided into the Senate and House of Representatives, while the California legislature is divided into the Senate and Assembly.
• Committees in the first house hold hearings on the bill and then the house votes on the bill as a whole (called a floor vote).
• If a bill passes the first house, it is sent to the second house, where the process repeats. 
• Then, the bill is sent back to its original house, which can vote to concur in any amendments made by the second house or request a conference committee to draft compromise text. 
• Finally, the bill is signed or vetoed by the president or governor:

Once the bill has passed:

• It is published individually. Individually published laws are variously called slip, public, or chapter laws.
• It is published by date in session laws.
• It is organized by topic in a code, split across one or more titles and sections.

The chart below provides example citations, showing a bill's transformation into an individual law, session law, and finally one or more code sections: