Tracking Ohio Legislation

A new two-year session of the Ohio General Assembly , the 128th General Assembly, started this January. Any bills not passed in the 127th General Assembly have to be reintroduced. The first bills of this new assembly were introduced a few days ago. To see newly introduced bills, go to Ohio Capitol Connection, and click on Legislation link. The bills range from the film tax credit to establishing an Ohio Turfgrass week.

To keep up with Ohio legislation, try the following:

Library Subscription Databases (available remotely to students/faculty and in the library)

• Gongwer : Create e-mail alerts by bill number, keyword, Revised Code section and/or legislative sponsor. To do so, create your own account through the Register option at the top of the page. Upon logging in, click on My Gongwer to create alerts. You may also subscribe to the Gongwer RSS feed for state house news.
• LexisNexis and Westlaw Alerts – Search the OH Bill Tracking and OH-BILL TRK databases and/or set up an alert. See LexisNexis / Westlaw “Saved Searches” (must have law student/faculty account)
• Ohio Capitol Connection –We don’t subscribe to the ActionTrack feature which sends emails regarding the status of a bill. Check the site manually for updates. Educational use only.

FREE web database: Search the Ohio General Assembly’s web page by bill number, keyword or sponsor.

There is no free tracker for Ohio similar to GovTrack.us , which is for federal statutes. Make your own tracker

using WatchThatPage.com , a free service that sends an email when a webpage changes. You could put at watchthatpage on a bill on the Ohio General Assembly’s website. A watch on the “Status Report of Legislation” page may work the best. You could also do a watch on the Ohio Judicial Conference’s legislative update page, which covers recently passed legislation of interest to judges and lawyers.