How the Law Tracker is built
Sources, schedule, lanes, gaps and the update history. Current ledger: 43 items, last watch September 22, 2026.
Sources
| Body | What is read | Official record linked |
|---|---|---|
| New York State Legislature and the Governor | Bills delivered to the governor, signed into law and vetoed, through the Senate's Open Legislation API; the governor's press room for signing and veto announcements. | nysenate.gov bill page |
| New York City Council | Introductions, items passed by the Council, local laws enacted and mayoral vetoes through the Council's Legistar API, plus the Council press office feed. | legistar.council.nyc.gov legislation detail |
| Nassau County Legislature | The adopted local laws list and the Full Legislature meeting calendar for each meeting in the window and the next scheduled one, which lists every ordinance, local law, resolution and clerk item up for a vote. | nassaucountyny.gov document |
| Suffolk County Legislature | The running local-laws report for the year and the per-meeting laid-on-the-table reports, which carry every new introduction with its sponsor and committee. | suffolkcountyny.gov document |
Schedule
The Albany watch runs Tuesday and Friday mornings; the local watch runs fifteen minutes later. Each run records what is new since the previous run and the window it covered. The ledger page shows the date of the latest run; it is never the date the page was rebuilt.
Practice lanes
Every item is classified into the lanes the firm practices in, and only items in a lane are published: insurance and no-fault; labor and employment; vehicle and traffic and road safety; municipal and public-entity claims; civil rights and policing; consumer and housing; public health and products; foreclosure and real property. Budget transfers, tax-map conveyances, sewer districts, appointments and proclamations are filtered out as noise.
Classification is by title and, where the source provides it, the summary. A misclassified item is corrected in the next run; nothing is edited by hand on this site.
Known gaps
- Suffolk County's resolution search application and the county code on ecode360 block automated requests, so approval dates for Suffolk resolutions are not captured; local laws are.
- Nassau County's site rejects non-browser requests; the watcher identifies itself as a browser and reads only public documents.
- New York City coverage depends on the Legistar API; when it is unavailable the press feed alone is read and the run says so.
- A date later than the watch date is a scheduled meeting, not an action: Council items are pre-filed for a stated meeting and county calendar items carry the meeting date; the ledger says "for the … meeting" for those.
- Nassau County settlement resolutions ("authorizing the county attorney to compromise and settle") are listed in their own block; the amounts appear only when the calendar states them.
- An item's status is the source's own word for it ("Enacted", "Filed", "Committee"); statuses are not harmonised across bodies beyond the labels shown.
- Effective dates are not tracked here. A signed bill's effective clause is in the bill text at the linked record.
The data
The whole ledger is available as a CSV file (identifier, body, status, date, title, lanes, official URL, first-recorded date), published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Cite it as "Downstate New York Law Tracker, Law Office of Jason Tenenbaum, P.C., as of September 22, 2026".
Planned: the quarterly decisions report
A coded read of a quarter's published Appellate Division decisions in one narrow lane at a time, with the sampling frame, the coding rules, a table of every case and the limitations stated. The first lane is being selected by the attorney; the report will publish the month after the quarter closes and will be listed here.
Update history
- September 22, 2026: tracker launched with the Albany watch (running since September 20, 2026) and the New York City, Nassau and Suffolk watch (first run September 22, 2026).