prevent an update from occurring under certain conditions - Mailing list pgsql-novice

Hi,
I'm not sure where to look for information about how to accomplish this:

TABLES
state:
  id | state_name | active
----+------------+--------
   1 | Washington | t
   2 | Illinois   | t

county:
  id | county_name | active | state_id
----+-------------+--------+----------
   1 | King        | t      |        1
   2 | Jefferson   | t      |        1

I want to prevent an update to set a state's active to false if there
are any counties in that state that are active (county.active = true and
county.state_id = state.id)
Is this possible?

Thanks in advance for your help.