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Oregon Legislative History Research

Using the Session Law

The session laws are the bills passed by the House and Senate during the legislative session. Session laws are helpful in tracking what language was changed, added, or removed from a statute. Depending on your goal, you will likely need to consult with the session law for each year indicated in the history of the statute.

  • Bold text indicates new language.
  • [Italicized text in brackets] indicates deleted language.

A bill number is located at the beginning of the session law. The bill number will be needed to track down additional legislative history.

The effective date can be found at the end. Typically that is January 1 of the year following the legislative session; however the legislature may declare a different effective date, or declare an emergency, in which case the act becomes effective immediately upon passage.

Example

[2015 c.525 §2; 2017 c.207 §1]

In this example, we will look at the 2017 session laws.

  • Go to the Oregon Laws page on the Oregon State Legislature website.
  • Open the 2017 Session by selecting the + next to Session: 2017 Regular.
  • Scroll down and select Chapter 0207. A pdf of Chapter 207 should appear.

2017 Chapter 207 snippet

Notice that the bill number is located near the top: HB 2482

Section 1 (a), in the green box, is entirely in bold indicating it is a new language.

Near the bottom, in the red box, language is italicized in brackets indicating deleted language.

End of Chapter 207

The effective date at the end shows that it went into effect January 1, 2018.