California Legislative Information Archives
For legislative history research prior to 1999, research becomes a little more involved, and information is not necessarily completely available. Fortunately, the California Legislative Information maintains its archived website at leginfo.ca.gov with much of the same information back to 1993. The website looks a bit antiquated, as seen below, but is fairly simple to navigate. The most useful resources found on this site are bill versions and file analyses dating back to the 1993-1994 legislative session.
Most of the text on the homepage is not pertinent to our purposes here, so click the “Bill Information” tab in the footer.
From the next page you can search specifically for a bill number by selecting the appropriate session and entering the bill number below.
Bill information is presented as links on one page and generally is organized by:
- Status
- History
- Bill versions
- Analyses
- Votes
As mentioned before, the California Legislative Information archived page is best when used to research bill versions and analyses from 1993-1999. It is not particularly useful if you only have a statute number citation as there is not a way to search for bill versions by statute number like you can on the current California Legislative Information site. To find the bill number from a statute citation for older legislation, you will need to consult another online source, the Chief Clerk of the Assembly’s Archives.