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Legislative Research: Bills and Public Laws: Georgia Bills & Session Laws

Resources for finding and tracking legislative bills and public laws current and historical.

Bills (Georgia General Assembly)

2001-present

Georgia General Assembly - legislation
Includes prefiles, first readers, and bills passed and signed by the governor.  To bring up years prior to the present session first select "First Readers" or "Prefiles" and then select the desired session.  "Composites" provide final daily status of all bills introduced during a session including all actions taken on the bill, starting with the 2007-08 session.  Earlier composite summaries can be found in the Georgia Government Publications database, (House: 1995- ; Senate 1996-) by searching on "composite status".  1991-1994 are in the Main Library (Folio GA L 412 .S1 S781).

Links to video archives of current and recent proceedings of the floor of the Georgia House of Representatives as well as many House committees are available.  Years of coverage varies.  Some previous years may be available upon request to House Media Services staff (for Committee videos) and by contacting GPB (for floor proceedings).       

pre-2001

Georgia Archives, 1842- (many gaps and missing bills until the 1860s)  Researchers visiting the Georgia Archives may request access to bills from the collection: Engrossed Bill (Record Group 37-1-1).  Prior to their visit researchers should know the years and bill numbers.  See Preliminary Descriptive Inventory of what bills are available through 2000.

Clerk of the House, 1997-present
Visitors to the State Capitol may request a copy of a bill from recent sessions from the Clerk of the House.

Journal of the House...Georgia
Journal of the Senate...Georgia
The Journals may contain the text of third readers of selected bills on the date of their reading in the chamber including proposed changes. 
1876- Georgia Government Publications. 

Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Georgia, 1876-

Journal of the Senate of the State of Georgia, 1876-

It is generally recommended to download the pdf volume(s) you need to your local computer and work with them within Adobe Acrobat Reader rather than using your web browser.  To download a volume, click on the View Document Images button (located within each volume record in the database).  Then, as the system attempts to load the volume in your browser window, click the download icon over in the upper right of the window to bring the file to your local computer. 

Open the downloaded volume in Adobe Acrobat Reader. To search, use the Find command (ctrl f). 

When searching for a specific bill number, be sure to separate the prefix from the number with a space, e.g., SB 250. 

The search will likely find several instances of the bill number, each corresponding to some action that was taken relative to the bill.  One type of action is a 'reading' of the bill which sometimes includes the full text of the bill itself. 

Using this search method is also how you can find other pertinent dates about the bill (e.g., the date introduced and by whom, the committee it was referred to, if the bill was replaced by a substitute, the date voted on sometimes including a roll call vote).

 1808-1875 (print): Special Collections Library
1810- (print)  University of Georgia Law Library (KFG18 .A25 & A26)

Acts (Session Laws) (Georgia)

Georgia Laws
(other titles: Georgia Session Laws / Acts and resolutions of the General Assembly of the state of Georgia)

1799-present:
HeinOnline (UGA researchers)

1799-1999
Georgia Legislative Documents   

This resource provides access to the unformatted text of each page of each volume contained in the original Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia from 1799-1999.  If you know the year of the legislation and the page number where the text of the legislation begins, you can use this resource to find and read the relevant page(s).  For instructions on how to do a search, please view this brief tutorial: bit.ly/GaLegDocHelp. Hint: A piece of legislation might begin anywhere on the starting page. One useful visual cue is the phrase, Approved... (e.g., Approved March 27, 1995) which signals the end of one piece of legislation and the point right before the start of the next piece of legislation (hopefully the one you are seeking).

Note: If you are not a UGA researcher and you require the original page formatting, you will need to work with the print set such as UGA Libraries' set listed below either in person or through an intermediary such as the Map and Government Information Library or your InterLibrary Loan Department. If you are a UGA researcher, please use HeinOnline listed above.

1876-present print volumes:
  Map and Government Information Library (GA L 407 ). Pre-1876 volumes are in the Special Collections Library.

2000-present:
Georgia Government Publications: Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia

To find and access the text of specific acts and resolutions within the Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 2000- it is recommended to download the pdf of the entire volume which contains the Act you need and navigate to the Act using Adobe Acrobat Reader. 

1. Enter the database using the link above. Then click on the relevant year (Note the more link to show all the available years).  After clicking on the year, the database will present links to the database records for each of the volumes that comprise that year's Acts and Resolutions...

2. In the correct volume record, click the 'View Document Images' button as if to open the volume in the browser, but then, click on the small download icon in the upper right of the window.  This will let you download the entire volume as a .pdf file to your local computer where you can open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader and navigate to the specific Act you want to read.  Note: these are large files so be careful when printing to just select the exact page range you want!

Which volume(s) should you download? Depending on how much information you have about the Act you may need to download and open up more than one volume from that year in Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you are working from a legal citation (e.g., "2001 Ga. Laws xxx" where xxx is the page number within the 2001 volumes where the law begins) you might be able to guess which volume will contain the Act.  Public laws usually start in volume one and run into volume two if there are lots of them. A public law with a page number up to about 1,000 give or take is usually in volume one.  Private laws are probably not in volume one. If, instead of a legal citation, you have information such as the topic or name of the Act or the General Assembly bill number, you'll want to open one or more volumes to first find the indexes sections that can help point you to the page number where the Act starts.  Volumes two or three usually contain indexes.

Be advised also, the database records of the multiple volumes comprising any given year of the Acts and Resolutions... are not necessarily listed in correct numeric order within the database and are not subtitled with helpful words like volume one, etc.  So, for example, volume four for a given year, might be listed first. The easiest way to get to the right volume is to simply open any one of the volume records and look down towards the bottom left of the volume record and you will see clearly labeled links under See also to the other volumes for that year.  If the volume you want is among those other volumes, just click on the link to it to move to that volume record.

 

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