ATLANTA — Lawmakers are back at the state capitol where they are considering new laws for a state that already has enough laws to fill an entire stack of books.
"It looks like a set of encyclopedias," said Georgia State Political Science Professor and former state legislator Doug Teper. "It’s anything you can imagine."
Last year, Georgia’s Governor put his signature to nearly 300 new laws.
You first have to consider how many legislators there are at the state capitol. There is a total of 236 legislators in the House and Senate who are currently considering about 1,300 proposed laws.
Emory Political Science Professor Andra Gillespie points out each lawmaker has to answer to the people who elected them.
"They ran making certain promises, and part of the way that they're going to fulfill those promises is to introduce those ideas as pieces of legislation," 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 everybody's thought of everything," Teper said. "But they have to make some adjustments in the way we operate day-in-day-out as a society."
Legislators have to tackle a variety of issues. They have to pass laws to adjust a city’s boundaries, or amend a town charter. Laws are needed to regulate a new business.
"The framers, more than 200-years ago, couldn't have possibly thought about what technology would look like," Gillespie said. "Those things need to be regulated. These are things that you can't rely on a law that was passed 50 years ago or 100 years ago."
For this year’s legislative session, members of Georgia’s House of Representatives have proposed more than 1,000 new laws, while 374 proposed laws were born in the State Senate.