Editorial standards
The rules this journal works to, written down so that a reader can measure the articles against them.
Standards that are not written down are only preferences. These are written down, and every article on the site is meant to be tested against them.
Primary sources, and enough of them
Every article is built from statutes, regulations, agency instructions and court materials. Each carries five to seven of them in a printed source list, with a line saying what that source establishes. Secondary material — other people's articles, firm commentary, encyclopedia entries — does not count as a source here. A claim that cannot be traced to a primary text is cut rather than softened into something vaguer.
Links point at the official text wherever one exists: the statute on a government host or at Cornell's Legal Information Institute, the regulation in the electronic code, the instruction sheet an agency publishes for filers, the court's own docket or opinion page.
No dates, and the honest reason
Nothing on this site carries a publication date, a review date or a revision stamp. The meta line under a headline carries three things instead: the field, the jurisdiction, and how long the article takes to read.
The reasoning runs like this. What an article states is the rule as it stands in the source it cites; when that rule moves, the article is corrected in place rather than re-dated. A date would therefore record when a file was last touched, which is not the same as whether its contents are still true. A date also does work it has not earned: readers treat a recent one as a guarantee and an old one as a warning, and neither inference is safe on a page about law.
The limit of this deserves stating plainly. No promise is made here about how often anything is revised, and the absence of a date is not a claim of currency. Anyone who needs to know the state of the law on a particular day should open the cited primary source and read it there. That is the only place the answer is authoritative, and it is why the source list is printed in full at the foot of every page rather than tucked behind a footnote.
No invented people, no invented numbers
No bylines, no biographies, no credentials, no reviewer names, no testimonials, no ratings and no case results. There are also no statistics about this site: nothing counts the library, the fields or the readership, because the library grows and any figure printed would be stale soon after.
Federal and state kept apart
Some of these fields are wholly federal; others rest on state law with a federal floor above them, and a few turn on tribal law that is neither. Every article is labeled with the jurisdiction it describes, and within the prose a rule that differs from place to place is introduced that way in the sentence that first states it. Where a common pattern across the states is described, it is named as a pattern rather than presented as the national rule.
Advertising kept out of the reporting
Articles in the immigration field carry one paid link to an immigration law firm, marked as an outbound link. It buys placement and nothing else. It does not decide what an article covers, what it concludes, which sources it cites, or whether an article is written at all. No other field on this site carries a paid link of any kind. This is stated here, on privacy and on terms so that a reader meets the disclosure before meeting the link.
Photographs
One photograph per article, never reused anywhere else on the site, and only public domain, CC0 or Creative Commons Attribution material. ShareAlike and NonCommercial licenses are declined, since the crop and the house grade would make the result an adaptation. No image is generated, assembled from parts, or edited until it depicts something the camera did not. Photographer, source and license for every image are listed at image credits.
Sentences built to be read once
The rule comes before the exception, the procedure before the commentary, and a section is named for what sits inside it. Where a question genuinely turns on facts, the article names the facts rather than retreating into a hedge. Nothing is padded out to reach a length.
Corrections
Errors are fixed in the article rather than logged elsewhere, and where a fix changes the substance of an answer the article says so in its own text. Corrections explains how to report one and what follows.