(Hanukkah fell during finals this year, so there was no way I could get it done in time.)
Up until now, authors had to resort to tortured instructions when linking to N.Y. laws. Here’s how the Citizen Media Law Project does it in their excellent document, Forming a Corporation in New York:
. . . You can find the New York statute relating to the organizational meeting at N.Y. Bus. Corp. Law § 404 (link is to entire code, you need to click on the Business Corporation section, then choose Article 4 and locate the specific provision). . . .
Oy. Reminds me of the problems linking to Thomas documents. The issue here is that the state of New York doesn’t create permalinks to the statutes. I gave this a lot of thought, and created permalinks that look like this:
weblaws.org/states/new_york/statutes/n.y._business_corporation_law_sec._404
Remaining Issues
I wasn’t quite sure exactly what format these should take. The current scheme balances these competing concerns:
- People blog and write web pages with many different citation formats:
- A scheme that follows the Bluebook would start with N.Y. Bus. Corp. Law § 404. I saw this used by law review blog posts and the Citizen Media Law document, above.
- I found a state source that would write NY Business Corporation Law 404
- I found one law professor who’d write the equivalent of NY Business Corporation Law Section 404
- I found another who’d write NY Business Corporation Law sec. 404
- The URL is an interface between the website and search engines and web services, not just web authors.
- I’m unsure about how often (1) the consolidated laws are updated and (2) how often the state’s website is updated. I’ll add a date/revision notation to the permalink in a backwards-compatible way when I nail this down.
So the scheme above is what I settled on. Why can’t every state be like wonderful, efficient Oregon? We’ve got ORS 163.095, and the Bluebook/ALWD Or. Rev. Stat. § 163.095, and that’s it, really.
EDIT: I’ve discovered the Tanbook.
The Public.Law Blog 
There are other efforts including one by Joe Carmel and others called legislink.org
You should see what they are doing as they have redirects that can go deep into a document including .pdf and text documents.
http://legislink.org/
Daniel Bennett
eCitizen Foundation
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