For many lawmakers, the art of bill writing — putting a complex policy idea into legislation that’s both practical and able to stand up to legal scrutiny — can be a challenging one, even for those with years of experience.

But there’s a resource that can help: the CSG Shared State Legislation (SSL) program.

This member-driven service produces an annual compendium of some of the states’ most innovative bills, all curated by a bipartisan committee of state lawmakers and legislative staff and organized by topics of major interest to the states, offering a starting point for other lawmakers addressing those same policy areas.

“The essence of CSG is about helping people in one state learn from people in another state, and Shared State Legislation is the embodiment of this,” said David Adkins, CSG executive director/CEO. “It means if I’m working on a problem in my state, and I’m not quite sure how to solve it, a lot of times the first question I’ll ask is whether some other state has already dealt with this. The SSL volume was something I found useful as a legislator, and I’m proud that CSG continues to empower our members to come together to select the bills that they think are innovative enough to share with others.”

Formerly published annually in a printed volume, Shared State Legislation is now available online via the CSG website, where it can be searched and filtered by policy topics.

What sets the SSL volume apart from other bill resources, said Jay Hartz, director of Kentucky Legislative Research Commission and a 20-year member of the SSL Committee, is that its bills have been carefully vetted by experienced lawmakers and staff who keep an eye out for novel and practical solutions to complex policy problems facing states.

“When you want a curated list of new, innovative and well-written legislation that was reviewed by smart people who are practitioners of the craft, that’s when you go to the SSL volume,” Hartz said. “One of the great things about the bills chosen for SSL is that they reproduce all the statutes being amended, so you get everything in context and understand the larger narrative flow of what the legislation actually does.”

Ohio Rep. Cindy Abrams, co-chair of the Shared State Legislation Committee, said she recently turned to the volume while researching a specific policy subject: Prescribed Pediatric Extended Care centers (PPEC), which offer a safe daytime environment for children who require complex medical or technological support outside the scope of a traditional daycare center. She found a bill from neighboring Kentucky that accomplished much of what she was looking to address.

“As a lawmaker, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel if someone else is doing it and doing it well,” Abrams said. “You can always tailor the bill to your state, so it doesn’t have to be the exact same thing.”