Skip to Main Content

POLI SCI 109B: The Politics of Public Policy: Find Legislation (State)

California Laws - Background/Historical Information

The Law Library's research guide on finding CA legislative history documentation (bills, hearings, reports, etc) takes you through that research process step by step, but the most productive and informative documents to look for are usually to be found in legislative documents called the bill versions (to the extent any contain statements of legislative purpose), legislative intent letters, and the Governor's chaptered bill file (bills signed into law).

Sources for California legislative materials are below:

CA Public Policy Blogs

Blogs provide opinions and/or news from a particular agency or organization and breadcrumb link trails to other sites that you may not have already thought about pursuing to develop an area of policy or current events in which you have a focused interest.  Here are a few suggested blogs to visit

  • Rose Report - news and commentary from the the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, Claremont McKenna College.
  • Capitol Roundup-More provocative daily commentary and links from the editors of Capitol Weekly and AroundtheCapitol.com.
  • Rough and Tumble-More of a daily news digest than a blog, but extremely useful in tracking the events and people that California's major newspapers are covering.
  • Calitics-A very irreverent and smart-alecky progressive California politics weblog.

Other States

Strategies for finding legislation from states outside California will vary by state since each state decides how to publish its legislation.  Another factor to consider is that not all state legislative bodies meet every year--some states legislatures, like Alaska and Texas, are only on session every other year.  Use the below resources to discover legislation from other states.

Another way to discover state legislative activity is to read the local news sources.  The below databases contain newspapers and other sources of news from cities, including many state capitol cities, from around the U.S.