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 and resolutions of the 119th Congress as introduced, with current status (layer: Legislation; serves the most recent 90 days — continuous from 2026-09-10 — while older bills are archived by month and not served)
• CourtListener — federal and state court opinions and dockets, searched across the full index (layer: Court Rulings)
• Federal Register — every federal agency document published daily. The Regulations layer keeps the final rules (type=RULE); the Federal Register layer carries the full set and is switched off by default (layers: Regulations, Federal Register)
• ACLU — the ACLU's own feed: civil-rights litigation, legislative alerts and advocacy (layer: ACLU Liberty, off by default)
• Cato Institute — Cato's own articles, indexed through Google News because cato.org/rss answers non-browser clients with a 403 (layer: Cato Policy, off by default)
• Standing news queries — targeted Google News searches for the qualified-immunity doctrine, law-enforcement killings and shootings (ICE/ATF/police), International Criminal Court coverage, and the constitutional-rights cluster: Second Amendment, free speech, First and Fourth Amendment, religious liberty, due process, property, parental rights, assembly, press (layers: Qualified Immunity, Enforcement Accountability, Int'l Criminal Court, Civil Liberties)
• UN News — human-rights desk — rights violations, impunity, arbitrary detention and reprisals as the UN itself reports them (layer: Human Rights)
• BBC News — world feed — elections, conflict, repression, protest and leadership worldwide. Moved here from PlanetWatch on 2026-09-24 together with its history; it is the widest layer we carry and the least filtered, so its info card says what it keeps (layer: World Politics)

Every layer is one feed, and every feed above is one layer. Curation rules are published in the repository (shared/curation.json); records they exclude are preserved with their reason in shared/quarantine/ rather than deleted, and each layer's data file records how many were excluded.

Served window. One layer is served as a rolling window rather than in full. GovTrack introduces 30–36 bills a day, so the Legislation layer only grows: the merge is additive and nothing is ever dropped, which measured out at roughly 12,000 bills and 5 MB per year, forever, on a layer that loads by default. Legislation therefore serves the most recent 90 days (~3,000 records at that rate) and every older bill is written to a monthly archive beside it (api/data/_archive/legislation/) — the same records, one file per month, de-duplicated, nothing deleted. The served file states its own window and the size of the archive, and each layer's info card reports what the server serves. The window is measured from the newest bill on file, so a quiet month never ages the layer out. Recovering a window into the served layer is the recorded one-liner in docs/legislation-coverage.md.

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, CourtListener, the Federal Register, UN News, the BBC world feed and standing news queries every 6 hours

Technology

Leaflet Python GovTrack API ViewerEngine RSS GH Actions

Contact

[email protected]

Privacy

UltraVires does not collect personal data. No cookies, no tracking scripts, no analytics. All data is sourced from public government feeds.