Let’s say you’re going on a first date and you want to make sure the person you’re meeting up with isn’t a registered sex offender. If you live in the US, you can find this out very quickly: there’s a centralized website provided by the US Department of Justice that lets you search a name or location in seconds.

This doesn’t mean that everyone found liable for sexual abuse comes up, of course. They have to have been convicted of certain sex offenses in a criminal, rather than civil, court to be put on the registry.

Now let’s say you want to check whether your potential date has ever been found guilty of domestic violence. Good luck with that. There isn’t a similar sort of centralized registry and you’d have to look through various court records.

If you live in Tennessee, however, that situation has just changed: the state has created the first registry in the US to track repeat domestic violence offenders. Anyone convicted of more than one domestic violence offense after 1 January will be registered in a public database maintained by the Tennessee bureau of investigation. The new legislation, Savanna’s Law, is named for Savanna Puckett, 22, who was shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend, James Jackson Conn, in 2022. Conn, who also suffocated Puckett’s dog, had a history of domestic violence and stalking.

The fact that Tennessee, consistently

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