In 2018, CDL's Digitization team completed a collaborative project with the California Office of Legislative Counsel and librarians from UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the California State Library, to digitize and open for worldwide access 4,000 volumes of legacy publications from the California Legislature. Since then, more than 300 additional volumes have been digitized and added to the collection.

Created in 1849 - before California was admitted to the Union in September 1850 as the 31st state - the California Legislature has a colorful history. These digitized legislative materials allow anyone to dig into the history of California, deepen their understanding of the role of the legislature in government, and strengthen their overall understanding of the workings of American democracy. The first act of the new Legislature, in January 1850, was to pass a law to create Public Archives. Their second act was to create the Office of State Printer. The fledgling legislators believed that the preservation and documentation of their work, and the work of the new government, was essential.

We have created a public-facing Google Sheet - California Legislative Publications Collection Links to HathiTrust & Google Books - that lists each volume by title and year with links to both HathiTrust and Google Books. To make it easier to discover the materials via HathiTrust search, we have also created a discrete HathiTrust collection, California Legislative Publications 1850-2009:

While anyone may read these full view materials in HathiTrust, and download one page at a time, users affiliated with a HathiTrust member library can login and download an entire volume. Anyone may download entire volumes of full view materials in Google Books.  


The Legislative Materials

The legislative materials are voluminous and can be confusing to navigate and search. Luckily, there are some helpful guides from the UCLA Law Library, the UC Berkeley Library, and the California State Library. However, it is easy to browse around in a volume for a given year and/or conduct keyword searches for specific topics or persons using the stand-alone HathiTrust Collection. 

Below is a list of what’s currently in the collection with a brief overview for each series. Please note that each series may not contain every publication and every year. 


Assembly and Senate Bills

Overview: A bill starts as an idea which a legislator decides to author. The legislator sends it to the legislative counsel where it is drafted into the actual bill. The draft of the bill is returned to the Legislator for introduction in the Assembly or Senate. These series contain bills organized by the year they were introduced. 


Legislative Journals

Overview: The Journals summarize what happened each day on the floor of the Senate and Assembly, including which bills were introduced, referred to committee, received from committee, debated, amended, voted on, referred to the governor, or signed or vetoed by the governor. 


Appendix to the Journals

Overview: The Appendix to the journals contain reports to the legislature from the Governor, Controller, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and other public officials.


Statutes

Overview: Once a bill is passed by the legislature and approved by the Governor it is assigned a chapter number. The Chaptered Bills are also referred to as Statutes for the year they were enacted. The statues become part of the California Codes.


Amended Constitutions

Overview: Contains recent amendments to the California Constitution plus the US Constitution and historical documents related to both constitutions.

  • Amended Constitutions, 1931-2016
    • Example: Each of these volumes includes an extensive article on The Constitutional History of California, written by Paul Mason, the assistant Secretary of the Senate from 1929-1932. One interesting bit: the history explains how California’s original 1849 Constitution was cobbled together using the constitutions of 20 other states as well as the US Constitution. 


Final Calendar and History

Overview: Final Calendar and History are created at the end of each legislative session, they list all actions taken on all bills during the legislative session (see UCLA Law LibGuide).


Legislative Index

Overview: A subject matter index of all legislative measures for the current legislative session.


Learn more about the California Legislative Materials project from earlier posts: