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A–Z Index All Entries About

How We Source

Primary law first, the administering agency second, and a list of what never gets cited.

The hierarchy

  1. Primary law. The statute, the regulation, the court rule, or the published decision itself.
  2. The administering body. The agency that actually runs the programme — its policy manual, forms, and official instructions.
  3. Uniform acts and official commentary. Useful where the same model text has been enacted in many states, with the standing caveat that enactment is never uniform.
  4. The judiciary's own materials. Self-help centres, clerks' instructions, and procedural guides published by courts.

Every entry carries at least four sources, of which at least two are primary or official.

What never gets cited

  • Other law-marketing sites and content farms. If a proposition can only be sourced to a site selling legal services, it does not go in.
  • A secondary summary standing in for a rule that is itself available.
  • Anything paywalled past the point where a reader could check it.
  • Undated, unattributed, or unversioned material.

We link to stable, top-level official pages rather than deep paths that agencies reorganize. A link to an agency's page for a form survives a site redesign; a link to a PDF three directories down usually does not. Where a specific provision matters we cite it by number as well, so the citation outlives the URL.

External links open in a new tab and carry rel="noopener noreferrer".

Verification, and its limits

Source links are checked automatically when the site is built. Several government hosts refuse automated requests outright, so a failed automated check is treated as a flag for a human rather than proof that a page is gone — and the build report records the difference honestly instead of quietly swapping in a different link.

Where a host was unreachable at build time, we verify the underlying citation against an independent authority — the eCFR for regulations, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel for the United States Code — and record that we did.

Volatile material

Fee schedules, benefit amounts, indexed thresholds, and rules currently in litigation move faster than any publication can track. For those we describe the mechanism, date the statement in the text, and send you to the source carrying the live position. That is more useful than a number that was right when it was typed.