U.S. State Legislative Tracking Site

The October 30 issue of Cornell Law Library's InSite current awareness service describes the National Conference of State Legislatures' 50-State Legislative Tracking Web Resources.

The InSite annotation explains that the site "provides access to legislative and statutory databases, compilations, and state charts and maps covering a variety of issues throughout the fifty states (...) Statute charts indicate the states that have legislated in a particular area with reference to the relevant code sections."

The site makes it possible to compare how various American states have legislated in areas such as financial services, budgeting and taxation, criminal justice, education, electoral law, energy, environmental protection, ethics, healthcare, the rights of labour, telecom and information policy, and transportation.

Earlier Library Boy posts that discuss the National Conference of State Legislatures include:

• Privacy Breach Resources (July 4, 2005): "The National Conference of State Legislatures has a list of state legislation (in effect or under consideration) requiring notification of consumers when the security of computerized systems containing personal information has been breached."
• List of Electronic Surveillance Laws in the U.S. (December 22, 2005): "The National Conference of State Legislatures has compiled a detailed list of U.S. state and federal legislation and warrant procedures in relation to electronic wiretapping and eavesdropping."
• Lobbyist and Government Ethics Resources in the U.S. And Canada (January 12, 2006): "Center for Ethics in Government: part of the National Conference of State Legislatures, the website provides information on ethics laws and commissions for each U.S. state, laws covering gifts, nepotism and conflicts of interest, and news stories about government ethics issues."
• Whistleblowing Resources - International (February 26, 2006): "State Whistleblower Laws (National Conference of State Legislatures): "Although legislatures in all fifty states have enacted whistleblower protection statutes, the measure and scope of state laws vary greatly. Most state statutes focus on protection against employer retaliation and provide a cause of action and remedies for whistleblowers who experience job-related retaliation as a consequence of their revelations. There are also important points of divergence within the anti-retaliation provisions, including the type of whistleblower protected, the subject of protected whistleblowing, the requirements for filing a grievance and appeal, and the remedies provided to the employee suffering retaliation. Most states offer general whistleblower protection to public employees, while fewer than half offer the same protection to all workers. States which have enacted whistleblower protection laws for private sector employees are even fewer. Many state statutes protect whistleblowers whose disclosures involve mismanagement, waste or abuse of authority."