Finding California Legislative History  

Checklist

Here's a slightly modified PDF version this library guide as well as a fillable PDF version of just the Checklist:

A legislative history is an examination of the documents created during the process by which a bill becomes law, and is sometimes used by courts to find legislative intent if a statute is vague or ambiguous.

Two possible scenarios exist for constructing a California legislative history.

1.  The first is when you must trace the “history of the statute” by assembling the documents that represent various versions and analyses of the legislation itself.

2.  The second, immensely more difficult, involves trying to determine legislative intent by analyzing all documents related to the passage or rejection of the particular bill or law.

This second scenario is made more difficult by the limited availability of California legislative history documents compared with those available for conducting federal legislative histories. For example, committee hearings on California bills are usually not transcribed and reports on bills are rarely prepared. As well, there is no written record of debate.

Thus, if your goal is merely to determine the “history of the statute,” you can usually complete the work yourself fairly quickly. However, if your goal is a comprehensive search to determine legislative intent, consider first whether you have the time and ability to conduct the research yourself, or whether it might be more efficient and cost-effective to hire a commercial service to search for the materials for you.

An Important Caveat: if someone's fortune or freedom is riding on the result of a California legislative history you should seriously consider using a commercial service in addition to your own research (see the box directly below).

Much useful documentation on California legislation is unpublished and stashed away in archives or in file cabinets in legislative offices in Sacramento. This unpublished information can be very enlightening, but it is hard to find—especially for anyone who only occasionally does California legislative research. Although there are fees charged by these services they are often able to find materials that elede most non-specialist researchers. If a thorough legislative history is critical to your case or research project, consider hiring one of the private legislative research services listed below:

Legislative Research Incorporated, 926 J Street, Suite 806, Sacramento, CA  95814, (800) 530-7613. (Legislative Research Inc. offers special rates for USF law students researching legislative histories for law school projects. See a Zief reference librarian for more information.) http://lrihistory.com/

Jan Raymond Legislative History & Intent, P.O. Box 74005, Davis, CA  95617, (888) 676-1947.
http://www.naj.net/Web/default.php

Legislative Intent Service, 712 Main Street, Woodland, CA  95695, (800) 666-1917.
http://www.legintent.com/

These sites have lots of good tips and advice on doing California legislative histories.

This library guide contains a number of examples of searches in different Westlaw and Lexis resources. You must have a valid password for those services in order to use the example links. Not all Westlaw and/or Lexis subscription agreements will include all the resources listed in this guide.