Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2024

Abstract

State statutes are having a moment in national debates. Partly fueled by polarization, state legislatures have pushed the boundaries on almost every important national question, from abortion and regulation of social media, all the way to police lawsuits and drug use. Take, for instance, the by now well-known example of Texas Senate Bill 8. To avoid Roe v. Wade, the Texas Legislature enacted a statute that allowed private parties (really, anyone) to sue abortion providers. The kicker was that the statute prohibited government enforcement in order to prevent Ex parte Young style challenges in federal court. Or take Montana’s attempt to ban the use of TikTok within the state. In Senate Bill 419, the Montana Legislature imposed a penalty of $10,000 for each discrete violation of the statute, including the continued availability of TikTok or downloads of the app in the state. In both of these cases, state legislatures regulated a politically contentious area of law. And this is just the beginning. In an empirical study of state private enforcement, we found that states have added private remedies for harms arising from novel digital technologies, including issues related to privacy, recording devices worn by police officers, broadband accessibility, electronic communications, and online criminal activity.

Notwithstanding the importance of these state statutory developments, scholars have no readily accessible database to conduct empirical research on state statutes. Current databases do not provide granular data on statutory provisions, fail to flag trends in the adoption of new statutes across the states, cannot give fine-grained numbers on how many statutory provisions of a certain type exist, and are simply not optimized for cross-state statutory research. For example, current databases are not useful for researching the number of statutes that provide immunities to local officials, the growth of private rights of action over time, the differences in language between state foreign judgment enforcement statutes, or how states adapt model codes.

This Essay sketches out a vision of an in-progress effort to spur empirical research on state laws. We plan to use large language models (LLMs) to produce an annotated database of state statutes. This database would contain an easily accessible version of all state statutes and, within them, statutory clauses of interest to academics. Each clause would be annotated according to variables that might help researchers across a range of disciplines, including law, political science, and economics. These could include, for instance, whether a clause creates a private right of action, whether it creates an immunity from lawsuits, whether it is a criminal provision derived from a model code, and so on. In this Essay, we demonstrate an early application of the State Statutes Project, focusing on provisions that, in one way or another, contain foreign relations ingredients.

Our plan is for the Stanford Neukom Rule of Law Center to publish and host the database with the hope of supporting empirical work on state law. Such a database would hopefully emulate what similar projects have done in other areas, including the Comparative Constitutions Project, which opened up and significantly improved research on constitutional provisions. This Essay describes the goals of the project, its structure, and progress thus far.

Disciplines

Law | Science and Technology Law | State and Local Government Law

Comments

Copyright 2024 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System; Reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Law Review.

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