Finding California Primary Law

If you have not been able to find a relevant C.C.R. section through one of the methods discussed above, you can search for regulations topically by using one of the following methods:

• You can consult books and articles (i.e., secondary sources) on your topic to see if they discuss any relevant regulations.
• The print C.C.R. contains a subject index at the end of the set (located before the "Table of Statutes to Regulations" in the "Master Index" volume). If you find your topic in the index, it will tell you which C.C.R. title(s) and section(s) to look up in the set.
• You can search the LexisNexis Academic “State Statutes and Regulations Search" page, as described in the discussion of searching for statutes by topic. Choose "Advanced Options" and make sure the "Administrative Code" and "California" boxes are checked.

You can also search by topic in the publicly available online version of the C.C.R.  Click on "Search" at the upper right-hand of the homepage and then choose the "Search for Words" option.  Enter your keywords in the box. You can use AND and OR to link your terms and phrases, and you can truncate terms with an exclamation point (!) to pull up different versions of a particular word (e.g., accommodat! will retrieve documents containing the words accommodate, accommodating, accommodation).

Example:

• discriminat! AND age will look for code sections in which the word age and either discriminate, discriminates, discrimination, or discriminating appear.

Also, the site allows you to use the proximity connector /# to specify that your terms need to be within a certain distance of each other in each document, the connector /s to specify that the terms need to be within the same sentence, and the connector /p to specify that they need to be within the same paragraph.

Examples:

• age /s discriminat! will search for regulations in which the word age appears in the same sentence with discriminate, discrimination, discriminating, and so forth.
• age /5 discrimination will look for regulations in which the word age appears within 5 words of discrimination.

Further, be sure to place quotation marks around exact phrases (e.g., "age discrimination").