How do you research historical laws or penal codes?

Factual Questions
1

I know I can easily find the current California Penal Code on the state government website. But suppose I know the law has changed and I want to see what the code was 20 or 30 or 60 years ago. Where can I look? Online references seem to be only the current version. Some public libraries carry the most recent one they bought in the reference section, but nothing older. The information must be out there somewhere.

2

For some older stuff you can try Google Books:
https://books.google.com/?hl=en

and the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/

3

Westlaw and LexisNexis have that information. They are not free.

Ask a reference librarian if the library has a subscription or if there is another library you can use.

4

If you have access to West’s Annotated California Codes (to give an example), look at the end of the text of the statute, before any cross-references or the “Notes” (the appellate court cases referring to the statute). There will be history of the statute all the way back to its original enactment; in California back to 1872 in many cases.

5

Yeah, if I need to look up old code sections I head to a law library and look at the West’s codes. Most law libraries will either let you in for free or a nominal fee (like $5) in my experience.

6

Where is this law library that charges fees to people to read its books?

7

I imagine the legislature concerned will have an archive of all it’s old legislation as well.

8

I don’t know if this would apply to any locations in the US, but in places where laws have to be published through a specific medium (in Spain, the Boletín Oficial del Estado or BOE and the Boletines of a handful of regions which publish their own; I’ve seen them called Gazettes in translation), the current version of a law will have the references to any previous versions, other laws and regulations with which it interacts, etc. And then you can look those up in the nearest law library or the site of the publication itself.

9

There are three ways

  1. The databases mentioned above have a annotation of changes that have occured to a statute. They sometimes (but not always) have repealed statutes available.
  2. Older reference books and texts. One of the reasons they are kept around.
  3. Pretty much every new statute is published and has been for about 150 years. Looking up in the legsilatures records, or journals/gazzette. Also many law reporters contain a list of statutes passed in a year. If you know the year that it was passed, you can find it.
10

On your state government website, you can see printed below each law a note about when it was amended. That’s the bits that look like this: “(Amended by Stats. 1994, Ch. 789, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 1995.)”

So, if you’re wondering what the law was in 1997, and it hasn’t been amended since 1995, you’re good. If there have been recent amendments and you need to know what has changed, one way I’ve found is to go to the website for the state legislature and look up the bill that amended that section. Bills usually have both the original text and the modifications, by strikethrough or some other method.

11

I usually find that notation following the text of statutes in West’s Annotated California Codes. I imagine a similar format is used for law volumes in other states. And I once had a volume of the California Vehicle Code, published by the state government in Sacramento. A similar notation format was used in that volume.

12

The closest law school to me lets students in for free but charges the general public $5 to use it. I figure that’s just because it’s a private school and that the public law libraries would be free.