Georgia Legislature Considers Over 1,000 New Legal guidelines | Here is why

State capital lawmakers are currently considering more than 1,000 new laws for the state.

ATLANTA — Lawmakers are back in the state capital, pondering new legislation for a state that already has enough laws to fill a stack of books.

“It looks like a series of encyclopedias,” said Doug Teper, a Georgia state professor of political science and a former state legislator. “It’s everything you can imagine.”

In the past year, the governor of Georgia put his signature to almost 300 new laws.

First of all, you have to consider how many legislators there are in the state capital. There are a total of 236 lawmakers in the House and Senate currently reviewing approximately 1,300 bills.

Andra Gillespie, a professor of political science at Emory, points out that every legislator must answer to the people who elected them.

“They’ve made certain promises, and part of the way they’re going to fulfill those promises is to legislate those ideas,” Gillespie said.

Teper said in many cases lawmakers are tweaking or updating existing laws.

“Georgia has been around for over 200 years and you think everyone has thought of everything,” Teper said. “But they need to make some adjustments to the way we function as a society on a day-to-day basis.”

The legislature has to deal with a large number of issues. You must pass laws to adjust a city’s borders or change a city charter. Laws are required to regulate a new business.

“More than 200 years ago, framers couldn’t possibly have imagined what technology would be like,” said Gillespie. “These things need to be settled. These are things where you can’t rely on a law that was passed 50 or 100 years ago.”

For this year’s legislative session, members of the Georgian House of Representatives have proposed more than 1,000 new laws, while 374 bills were born in the State Senate.