Statutes, also known as acts or session laws, are legislation as passed by a governing body; they “the law” as it is written.
At the California state level, legislators in the California State Legislature, which is comprised of two houses, the Assembly and Senate, introduce legislative proposals called bills. Each introduced bill is assigned a bill number. A denotes bills that originate in the Assembly and S denotes bills that originate in the Senate.
A bill passed by both houses of the Legislature is then sent to the Governor, who has 12 days to sign the bill into law, veto it, or approve it without a signature.
In California, session laws are called "chapters" because a bill is "chaptered" by the Secretary of State in chronological order after it is enacted. The Statutes of California is organized by chapter number, but well-known laws are often more commonly known by their bill number.
A statutory code is the body of law still in force, arranged by subject (eg Health and Safety Code). California Law consists of 29 codes, covering various subject areas, the State Constitution and Statutes. Note: UCSD does not retain previous editions of the California Code
If you have a citation to a law, you can type it directly into the search box in Westlaw. You can also use Nexis Uni, though you may have to also narrow your search with limits.
CalFresh for College Students Act (2022) example:
Because these standards are mainly for lawyers who are citing a particular point of law, for statutes and regulations, the best practice is to cite the codified (code) version of the law (e.g., the Cal. --- Code § xxx, etc.) unless the law is too new to have been codified, distributed across so many codes, no longer valid, being discussed in the context of its passage, or is otherwise impractical to cite this way. For policy research, you are often citing bills or regulations that have been introduced but not passed/finalized/enacted/enrolled, or else you are citing the final version of the legislation or regulation but not the code.
