How we work
The method behind a single article, from the question it answers to the checks it has to pass.
The output of a reference journal can only be judged if the process behind it is visible. This is the process, in the order it happens.
One article answers one question
An article begins as a single interrogative sentence, written in the words a practitioner would use rather than the words a search box collects. If an existing article already answers that sentence, the existing article is extended instead. Two pages competing over one question help nobody and degrade both, so the archive holds one page per question and improves it over time.
Sources before sentences
The source set is assembled before any prose is written. A federal procedure needs three things at minimum: the statute that controls it, the regulation carrying that statute into effect, and whatever the agency itself publishes to tell a filer what to do. Where a question turns on decided cases, it needs the court's own published opinions rather than a summary of them. Five sources is the floor and seven the ceiling. A subject that cannot support five is a subject this journal is not yet in a position to explain, and it waits.
The order of the argument
The rule comes first, then the exception, then what the two together mean for someone who has to act. Sections are named for what they contain rather than numbered. Where an answer depends on a fact, the fact is named instead of the sentence being hedged.
Two things are kept out on purpose. The first is prediction: how a tribunal would decide a particular matter is not something a general article can know, and writing as though it could is the fastest way to mislead. The second is exhortation. An article does not close by telling a reader to hire someone. Where representation usually decides an outcome, that is said at the point in the text where it is true, and the article stops there.
Saying when the law is unsettled
These fields contain real open questions. The circuits split on a jurisdictional test; an agency's guidance document is the only statement anyone has; a treaty obligation has never been litigated; a statute from another century is applied to facts nobody imagined when it passed. In each case the article says which situation it is in. A confident sentence over an unsettled question is the most damaging thing a reference page can print, because it is precisely the sentence a reader will rely on without checking.
The photograph and the meta line
Each article carries one photograph of a real place, real equipment or real work — a mine for a mineral rights piece, a container terminal for a customs piece, an office interior for an ethics piece. No symbols, no staged models, no generated images. Beneath the headline sits a line naming the field, then the jurisdiction, then the reading time, and never a date. The reasoning for that is on editorial standards.
Checks before publication
The build refuses an article mechanically before anyone reads it for sense. It rejects a file with fewer than five sources, a missing jurisdiction label, a section count outside the permitted range, a duplicate heading identifier, a British spelling, a reused photograph, or a date stamp anywhere in the file or its metadata. Internal links are resolved, alt text is verified on every image, and the archive is compared against itself so that no two articles answer the same question.
No machine can establish that a statement of law is correct. The printed source list carries that weight instead. It is there so a reader is able to check this journal rather than obliged to trust it.
Revision
An article is rewritten when the rule beneath it moves, when a reader shows an error, or when a passage turns out to be read the wrong way round. The change is made in the article itself. Where it changes the substance of an answer, the article states the new position and the fact that the position moved. Corrections covers how a reader starts that process, and about for what this publication is and is not.