About UltraVires
People & Liberty Tracker — measuring the delta between governmental authority and individual liberty.
Philosophy
UltraVires (Latin: beyond the powers) tracks people-related regional status — the legislative and judicial deviations from past norms that shape daily life across US jurisdictions. This is not an ideological project. It is a measurement project: are governments staying within their authority, or exceeding it? Are individual liberties expanding, contracting, or shifting territory-by-territory?
Every law passed, every ruling handed down, every regulation promulgated represents a deviation from the status quo ante. UltraVires maps these deltas — quantifying the direction and magnitude of change across federal, state, and local jurisdictions. The result is a live picture of how the relationship between people and government is evolving in real time.
Data Sources
- GovTrack.us — US federal legislation: bills, resolutions, status tracking, sponsor analysis, and committee assignments from the 119th Congress onward
- Supreme Court RSS — SCOTUS opinion announcements, docket updates, and certiorari grants from the Court's official feed
- Federal Register — proposed and final rulemakings from every US federal agency, published daily
- ACLU Liberty Feed — civil rights litigation, legislative alerts, and advocacy campaigns across all 50 states
- Cato Institute Policy Feed — constitutional law analysis, regulatory commentary, and liberty-focused policy research
- Congress.gov — bill text, summaries, co-sponsor counts, and floor activity (planned deeper integration)
- Justia / CourtListener — federal and state appellate rulings for geo-coded jurisdictional mapping (coming soon)
What We Track
- Legislative Deviations — new federal and state laws that alter existing rights, obligations, or jurisdictional baselines. Each bill is tagged by policy domain (civil rights, privacy, property, commerce, criminal justice) and mapped to its sponsoring jurisdiction
- Judicial Deviations — court rulings that reinterpret, overturn, or narrow existing precedent. Geo-coded to the circuit, district, or state whose legal landscape they affect
- Regulatory Drift — federal agency rulemakings that expand or contract regulatory scope, tracked by agency and subject matter
- Liberty Metrics — composite indicators measuring civil freedoms, property rights, privacy protections, tax burden, and criminal justice outcomes across jurisdictions. Designed to surface divergences — states and territories moving in opposite directions simultaneously
Features
- Interactive federalist map — colour-coded by liberty index, legislative activity, or judicial impact
- Jurisdiction drill-down — state-level views with bill timelines, court rulings, and regulatory activity
- Deviation scoring — quantitative delta measurement between a jurisdiction's current and historical baseline
- Multi-layer toggles — switch between legislation, rulings, regulations, and liberty metrics independently
- Automated data pipeline — polling GovTrack, SCOTUS RSS, Federal Register, and policy feeds every 6 hours
Technology
Leaflet Python GovTrack API ViewerEngine RSS GH Actions
Contact
Privacy
UltraVires does not collect personal data. No cookies, no tracking scripts, no analytics. All data is sourced from public government feeds.