STEP ONE: Look at the Revised Code section of interest in the current Annotated Code, such as Baldwin's Ohio Revised Code on WestlawNext - Ohio Statutes and Court Rules , or Page's Ohio Revised Code, on Lexis Advance. For example, say you are interested in ORC Sec. 5145.15.
STEP TWO: In Pages', underneath the text of the statute, you will see a section marked "History". The history section will look like this:
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HISTORY: |
The above is the history section from the 2012 Page's Ohio Revised Code for Ohio Revised Code Section 5145.15. In Baldwin's (Westlaw), this section is also immediately after the text of the statute, and is known as the "Credits" section.
The history or credits section provides citations to prior versions of the Ohio Revised Code section in question. The citations are to sections from previous Ohio Codes, or the Laws of Ohio volumes. In the above History, "RS" refers to an Revised Statutes section, S&S refers to a section of the code published by Swan and Saylor, and GC refers to the General Code. All of these are historical codes which existed before the Ohio Revised Code. For more help concerning historical codes, see Diagram - Evolution of Ohio Statutes.
"Bureau of Code Revision 10-1-53, refers to House Bill 1 of 1953. This House Bill revised and renumbered the previous Ohio General Code to created the Ohio Revised Code.
The rest of the citations in the above example refer to Laws of Ohio volumes. The first number refers to the Laws of Ohio volume. After the "v" you will find the bill number (for example, H 494) or the page number (If there is no H or S before the number, it is a page number). Sometimes a citation listing the year of the General Assembly is given, instead of the volume number. For example, "1971 h 602".
STEP THREE: Now you must locate the documents cited in the "history" or "credits" section. There are several ways of doing this:
Method 1. Pull from old copies of the Code/Statutes
Pull the Ohio Revised Code for one of the years that statute was effective. For example, if you wanted Ohio Revised Code section 5145.15 as it was in 1970, you could look at an Ohio Revised Code edition from between 1955 and 1971 or 1972.
Lexis Advance has the Ohio Revised Codes from 1996 on OH - Ohio Code Archive from 1996 and Westlaw has the Ohio Revised Codes going back to 1993 - Ohio Statutes Annotated - Historical on WestlawNext. Note that there is a link to the historical ORC on the right hand side of the ORC on Westlaw.
The library has some older versions of Page's Ohio Revised Code in the Main room. Also in the Reading Room are copies of the General Code, Revised Statutes and other older statute collections. The library may not have a copy of the Code for the year(s) you are interested in. In that case, you must use method 2, pull from session laws.
Method 2. Pull from session laws
The official source for session laws is the Laws of Ohio. See the Session Laws portion of this guide.
Page's Ohio Revised Code Annotated Archival CopiesWestlawNext has older versions of the Ohio Revised Code going back to 1993. You can find by typing Ohio Statutes Annotated - Historical in the search box. They can also be located by bringing up the current code, and looking at the menus on the right hand side of the page.
Lexis Advance has the older versions back to 1996. To find: search for code section; click on "Archived code versions" link in box on right-hand side. There currently is no way to run a full-text search in archived codes on this platform.
SInce 1927, session laws indicate what changes were made from the old version to the new.
1927-1969: Deletions indicated by asterisks and insertions by italics.
1969-2001: Deleted language reprinted with lines striking through it, and new language indicated in upper-case letters.
2001-present: Deleted language reprinted with lines striking through it, new language is underlined.