California Legislative History Research

Bill Information Page 

The Official California Legislative Information website's Bill Information page (link below) provides access to the full text of legislative bills introduced in the California legislature since 1999 as well as the committee and floor analyses for these bills. You can search for bills on this site by using the bill number or the name of the bill's author, or by keyword (as shown below). Make sure you select the appropriate legislative session near the top of the screen and indicate the type of search you wish to conduct before entering your terms.

For keyword searches, exact phrases can be placed in quotes. You can use the AND connector between terms to specify that all of them must appear in each bill and/or the OR connector to specify that at least one term must appear in each bill. Make sure to use all capital letters for your connectors. Finally, to pull up various endings of a root word, place an asterisk (*) after the root (e.g., discriminat* will retrieve bills containing either discriminate, discrimination, or discriminating).

The screenshot above shows a sample search for bills from both the Senate and Assembly from the 2017-2018 legislative session. Search terms can be entered into the Keyword(s) box.

Bill Documents

Once you run your keyword search on the Bill Information page, you will retrieve a list of the bills that meet your search criteria. If you select one of these bills, you will be sent to the bill's page, which allows you to do the following: 

• Check the "Status" of the bill (i.e., how far along it is (or went) in the legislative process),
• Check the bill's full "History" (i.e., all the legislative activity with respect to this bill),
• Obtain the full text of the different versions of the Bill text.
• Obtain the full text of the various committee and/or floor analyses that have been written for this bill under the "Bill Analysis" heading, and
• See how legislators in various committees and on the floor of the Senate and Assembly voted on the bill (under the "Votes" heading).

If you wish to find different versions of a bill introduced prior to 1993, you will need to find a print or microfiche collection of California bills covering your time period. The USC Law Library's collection of bills is on microfiche and goes back to 1969.