Oregon Legislative History Research

The bill number enables you to find the measure history, legislative committee assignments, exhibits, and audio/video of public hearings and work sessions. If you do not have a bill number, go back and review the session law.

Once you have the bill number, on the Oregon Legislative website, select the appropriate legislative session and then locate the bill number. Senate Bills start with SB and House Bills begin with HB. Once you select your bill, you will see several options:

• Overview displays important information such as sponsors, summary of the bill, and measure history, etc. The measure history shows committee agendas, dates of public hearings or work sessions, and audio archives of committee meetings.
• Text contains the different versions of the bill as it was introduced, amended, and finally enrolled.
• Analysis may include summaries, revenue and/or fiscal impact statements, and budget report.
• Meeting Material/Exhibits contains available exhibits for the bill. Exhibits may take the form of written testimony, letters in support of or against bills, empirical data, maps, etc. Just because you do not see any exhibits here does not mean there were no exhibits. Check the Oregon State Archives’ website to determine if exhibits accompanied the public hearing or work session and request them from Archives.
• Amendments may include any proposed amendments and their status.

Additional information can be found on the Oregon Legislative Information System Help page.

In this example, we will look at the bill amending the statute from the 2017 session. In the list of Legislative Sessions, select the 2017 Regular Session link.

From the Session law, we know we are looking for HB 2482. HB stands for House Bill. An SB would indicate it is a Senate Bill. In this example, browse the House Bills until we locate the range HB 2400-2499.

In this example, we will locate and select HB 2482. The links below the bill number direct you to the different versions of the bill.

An overview of bill information, different versions of the text of the bill, analysis, available exhibits, and amendments may be available for this bill.

An archive of bills from the 1996-2006 legislative sessions are available on the Oregon State Legislature's site. However, it only includes text of bills and amendments. For pre–2007 bills, consult a print Final Status Report for Legislative Measures. It is available in the John E. Jaqua Law Library as well as other law libraries in the state.

The law library has committee minutes available on microfilm from the 44th session (1947) to the 68th session (1995).