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 wellknown
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.
