Finding California Legislative Publications

Introduction

The Witkin State Law Library has an excellent guide to legislative history research which explains how to find bill texts, bill analyses, and histories of legislative actions.

What about committee reports, committee hearing transcripts, legislative directories, and other publications by the California Legislature?

General Search Tips

  • Enclose exact phrases in quotation marks. You will get a narrower, more accurate set of results for phrase “school safety” in quotation marks than for the words school safety without quotation marks.
  • If you get too few results or don’t find the phrase, try removing the quotation marks or using fewer search terms.
  • Look at the terms listed under “Subject” in catalog records for relevant documents. You might find new words and phrases you can search to find similar documents.

Committee Reports and Hearings at the California State Library

By Topic

  1. In the California State Library online catalog, select the “Advanced Search” option.
  2. Enter California Legislature into the author/creator search box.
  3. In an “any field” search box, enter a word or words related to the subject you are interested in. This might be something like “schools” or “agricultural laborers.”
  4. Use the “start date” and “end date” menus if you want results only for certain years.
  5. If you get too many results, revise the search or use the filters in the left-hand menu.

By Bill

Bill numbers and titles may appear in the document title, in notes, or as subjects. Bills may be referred to in different ways: for example, “Assembly Bill 42,” “AB 42,” or the title of the bill.

  1. Enter California Legislature, California Senate, or California Assembly (without quotation marks) into the author/creator search box.
  2. Set the date range to the years of the legislative session when the bill was considered.
  3. Search for different ways to refer to the bill in the “any field” search box.

You also may want to search for documents by a specific committee.

By Committee

To find out which committees considered a bill, check the “History” tab of the bill on California Legislative Information for bills from 1999 to present. For bills before 1993, check the Final History or Final Calendar. These are available from 1881 on the Chief Clerk of the Assembly’s web archive. See also California Legislative Publications 1850-2009 on HathiTrust.

Once you have identified the committees involved, you can perform an advanced search.

  1. Enter the keywords of the committee name into the author/creator search box. For example, Assembly Privacy Consumer Protection (without quotation marks).
  2. Set the start and end dates to cover the legislative session when the bill was considered. You may want to extend the end date by a year in case the committee published late.
  3. Don’t enter any subject keywords for your first search. This way, you will find every document published by the committee during the selected time period. If you get too many results, then you can add keywords or use the filters.

Committee Reports and Hearings Outside the California State Library

Committee Web Pages

Legislative committees may post reports and hearing transcripts on their official web pages.

Digital Reproductions

If a document was originally produced in print, search for it in WorldCat, which may link to digitized copies. You can also search digital libraries such as HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. If all else fails, try your favorite search engine (Google, Bing, etc.)

Unpublished Reports and Hearings

Some unpublished committee reports and hearings are held by the California State Archives.

Individual legislators may have left their papers to other libraries or archives. Search for these in the Online Archive of California.

Televised Floor Sessions, Committee Meetings, and Hearings

The California State Archives has a large collection of recorded legislative proceedings. Contact the State Archives for recordings not available online.

  • “Selected floor session and committee hearings: Senate (1992 – date) and Assembly (1988-1998).”
  • California Channel Video Archives: “1979-2019, bulk 1993-2019.” Recordings from March 2012 to October 2019 are available online.

The California Senate and Assembly also have online media archives.

Newspapers

Newspapers sometimes publish summaries or partial transcripts of legislative sessions.

Directories, Handbooks, and Other Miscellany

In the State library’s online catalog:

  1. Use the author/creator field in the advanced search to find documents by the California Legislature, specific legislative offices, etc.
  2. If relevant, add a keyword in for a type of publication, like “directories,” “handbooks,” or “constitution.” If you don’t find anything, try synonyms for your original terms.

Elsewhere online:

Final Considerations

Keep in mind that reports and hearing transcripts may never have been produced for the bill or subject and time period you are researching. The farther back in time you go, the less likely it is that the Legislature created such documents.