I have customers who are interested in learning more about specific state regulations...

...such as those that regulate the establishment of day care centers. Where can I find this information? And is it available online?

There are times when customers want legal information, but what they are seeking is not a law. As confusing as that sounds, state regulations are significant department policies that have the force of law but are not actually statues (laws). Black’s Law Dictionary defines a regulation as “a rule or order, having legal force, usually issued by an administrative agency.” For example, in the Family Law volume of the Maryland Code, Title 5, Subtitle 5 (FL 5-550-557.1) states that the Department of Education shall have authority to register family day care homes and adopt regulations that relate to the registration of family day care. But this law does not lay out the regulations one must follow to obtain that license. Those rules can be found in the Code of Maryland Regulations, more commonly referred to as COMAR. The details for the licensing procedure are found in COMAR under the title for the State Board of Education (Title 13A of COMAR). There is a hierarchical code number system, which makes it easy to identify where to find regulations. Here’s the explanation from the Division of State Documents (DSD) in the Secretary of State’s office.

DSD manages the system, which is identical to the federal practice of issuing regulations. First proposed regulations are published in the Maryland Register and later codified into COMAR.

The Maryland Code and COMAR are both online and very much up-to-date. You can also find them and many other legal links on the Maryland Law subject guide at SLRC. There are multiple ways in which COMAR can be searched. You can search by the agency name, through a table of contents structure or by using a keyword. It’s tricky. If you don’t use the keyword as it appears in the regulation, you won’t find it. It can be challenging. There’s another thing you need to know about COMAR online. When you retrieve the citations for a topic, you will get a list of regulation links to view. Regulations can only be opened one at a time because they are listed individually. There is no way to open all the regulations for a subject at once. So if you want, for example, to retrieve all the regulations pertaining to child and family day care you will have to click on each regulation one-by-one to open them. When you have a lot of regulations in one subtitle it can be very labor intensive! So try to be as specific as possible to limit your results.

You can get help from the Maryland Department librarians at SLRC. The Department has a few different indexes to COMAR and a complete set in hard copy. If you want to get a section without opening all the individual regulations they can fax or e-mail pages to you. If you still want more help on understanding COMAR, take a look at the Maryland law section of Legal Reference for Public Libraries e-Learning Module at the LATI site on slrc.info.