Editorial policy
Our editorial standards: primary sources, traceable claims, labeled inference, honest review status, and public correction notices, with limits on automated checks and private repository access.
The short version#
We aim to be right, to show our work and to say so when we are unsure. These are editorial standards, not guarantees that every page meets them. Repository checks can detect specified structural problems; they do not verify legal conclusions, source support for every claim, or completed attorney review. See How we verify what we publish.
Rules#
- Primary sources first. Statute, rule, agency form or court decision. Secondary sources may be listed, but they do not carry a claim about what the law requires on their own.
- Every claim should be traceable. Substantive claims should cite the supporting source or statute. Automated checks require a source or statute reference on non-exempt pages and resolve known references; they do not establish that each claim is supported.
- Statute text is extracted, not retyped. A script reads the Revisor of Statutes and stores extracted text with a cryptographic hash. Formatting and whitespace are normalized; a hash tracks the capture, not its completeness or legal accuracy. Extraction errors are ours to repair. The linked official text controls.
- Three things are kept apart. What the statute says; what agencies and practitioners do; what we think. Opinion sits under commentary headings and is labeled.
- "The statute does not say." Where the text is silent or ambiguous we say so, give the plausible readings and flag it for counsel. We do not fill gaps with confident guesses.
- No invented authority. No made-up case names, opinions, agency guidance, form numbers, fee amounts or statistics. If we cannot verify it, we leave it out.
- Fees, deadlines and forms are the highest-risk facts. Each is next to its source and an as-of date.
- No endorsement. We do not imply endorsement by or affiliation with any agency, firm, funder or vendor.
- Review status is honest. A page is "unreviewed" until a named reviewer's review is recorded in its frontmatter, with the date and scope.
Corrections#
Corrections are published on the affected pages, their updated dates change, and completed repairs are recorded on Corrections. Internal discussion and repository history are not public: the repository is private. A correction-log entry describes work actually completed, not a planned audit or a claim that the rest of the site was reverified.
Who decides#
The publisher is responsible for what is on the site. Authorized collaborators can propose changes through the private repository; public readers cannot use its issues, edit links or history. No public correction submission channel is currently available. See Contribute and Corrections. The full written standard, docs/editorial-standards.md, is available to authorized collaborators in the repository.