Keeping Track of the Scoundrels in Sacramento Just Got Easier With the Free Online California Code of Regulations

While still a law professor, California Supreme Court Justice Frank C. Newman paraphrased a US Supreme Court Justice to the effect that "...if the average farmer, in order to protect his rights under laws like the Crop Insurance Act, had to read the Federal Register as he reads his daily newspaper, we probably would not need crop insurance acts because there would no longer be any time to plant crops."*
Farmers and other citizens here in California face an additional burden of keeping track of the myriad state regulations that issue out of Sacramento on an almost daily basis. It is the duty of the state Office of Administrative Law to compile all state regulations  and make them available to all interested parties through the California Code of Regulations.
Of special interest to researchers is the electronic version of the California Code of Regulations. Recently upgraded, the site allows paging through the entirety of Code section by section as well as adding the following search options:

Search for Words With the Code   
Search within Specific Title(s) of the Code   
Search for a Specific Regulatory Section of the Code   
Find a Specific California Regulatory Agency (including direct links to the Code sections that discuss the powers and responsibilities of each Agency)   

Best of all, the search engine appears to allow authentic words and connector searching using the same techniques you know and love from Westlaw. Searching by word for:

pr(parole) and gang w/s color or tattoo or insignia

locates the  relevant code sections that have the word parole in the preliminary section of the code and include the word gang in the same sentence as color or tattoo or insignia. This means all the power of Westlaw searching at no cost.

Important Downside: It is worth noting that with all the power of true Westlaw searching comes one major headache: if you search for a phrase of more than one word the search engine for the Code will read the space as an automatic OR connector. For example, if you run the following search:

parole violation

you will get 2810 "hits", many of which only include the word violation but not the word parole. The solution is to put all multiword phrases within quotation marks. So if your search is:

"parole violation"

you find a much more reasonable 55 hits, all of which deal with parole violation.

* see: 63 Harv. L. Rev. 929 at page 953, quoting Justice Jackson's dissenting opinion in  Federal Crop Ins. Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380, 386 (1947)