Starting today, Pa. posts laws online

HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania's consolidated laws will be posted on a publicly available Web site beginning today, making it the last state to do so.

An internal committee of the state Senate, the Committee on Management and Operations, approved a resolution last month to put the consolidated statutes on the official Web site of the state legislature, www.legis.state.pa.us. A corresponding House committee had previously approved a similar resolution.

Until now, Pennsylvania has been the only state that did not maintain a public Web site giving people the ability to do their own legal research without purchasing legal textbooks or visiting a law library.

The state's 79 groups of consolidated statutes are currently assembled in the 107-volume "Purdon's Pennsylvania Statutes Annotated," with two centuries of cross-references, footnotes and commentary.

The legislature began assembling its own consolidated statutes in 1970, but the project remains largely unfinished. Many of the state's unconsolidated laws, such as the Public School Code of 1949, are written under an outdated organizational system.

Erik Arneson, a spokesman for Senate Republican leader Dominic Pileggi of Delaware County, said legislative officials would begin work later this summer on putting the unconsolidated laws online.