During the summer you may find yourself dealing with a local legal issue concerning land use, housing, traffic, or even the environment. If so you may need to look at local municipal codes. Through enabling statutes, states generally give cities and towns the authority to make local laws in many areas, including traffic regulation and planning, building and electrical codes, nuisance abatement, business licenses, and much, much more.
Many municipal codes are available online from the companies that help cities compile and maintain those codes. You should check out these commercial sites to see if the code you want is online: Municipal Code Corporation, General Code Publishers, American Legal Publishing.
Some Connecticut cities and towns provide access to their local ordinances on their websites. Here, for example, is the webpage for the City of New Haven with links to the Municipal Code, the Zoning Code and more.
If you want print you can look for a copy of a city or town’s municipal code at its public library. The Law Library has print copies of the municipal codes for the city of Hartford and the town of West Hartford.
Be mindful of this research caveat: Sometimes the online (and even the print) version of a code is not current. When in doubt, contact the clerk of the town or city to make sure that the code you are looking at is up to date. Updating is always an essential step in all legal research. When dealing with municipalities updating is especially important because of the lag time between a council's action and the publication and codification of the new ordinance.
