Editorial standards

The standards this handbook is held to, published so a reader can measure the pages against them.

Standards nobody publishes are only habits. These are published. A page failing one of them is broken rather than merely different, and it gets treated that way.

Five to seven primary sources

Articles are assembled from statutes, rules, agency instructions and decided cases. Between five and seven of those print beneath the article, each with a line saying what it establishes. A firm's client alert does not qualify. Neither does another publication's summary, nor an encyclopedia entry. A sentence untraceable to a controlling text gets cut, never softened into something vaguer.

Where a public copy of the controlling text exists, the link points at it: a statute as a government host publishes it, or as the Legal Information Institute at Cornell reproduces it, a rule as the electronic code prints it, the instruction sheet an agency issues to filers, a tribunal's own decision page.

No dates, and what their absence does not promise

No page here is stamped. Not published, not reviewed, not revised. The line beneath a headline holds the subject, the reading time and the jurisdiction, and nothing further.

The reasoning runs like this. An article states the rule as its cited source states it. Once that rule shifts, the page gets corrected where it stands rather than reissued under a fresh stamp. A stamp would record the last edit, which is a separate question from accuracy. It would also do unearned work. A recent stamp gets read as a warranty; a stale one gets read as a warning. Neither inference is trustworthy where regulated law is concerned.

The limit deserves stating flatly. No revision schedule is promised, and a missing stamp asserts nothing about currency. Whoever needs the law as it stands on a particular day has to read the cited source directly. That source is the only authority on the question, which is why every citation prints under the article instead of hiding in a footnote.

Nobody invented, nothing counted

No byline, no biography, no credential, no reviewer credit. No testimonial, rating or case result. No figures about the site either. No number is published for the pages here, the subjects, or the readers. The library keeps growing, and a printed figure would be stale almost at once.

Jurisdiction labeled, never blurred

Some of these subjects are federal throughout. Water rights are state law almost entirely. Several run on a federal floor with state programs stacked above it, and prison law divides by custodian. Every article carries a jurisdiction label. Inside the prose, a rule that varies is introduced as varying at the moment it is first stated. A pattern shared across many states is described as a pattern, never as the national rule.

The single paid link

Immigration sponsorship articles each carry one advertising link, marked outbound, pointing to an immigration law firm. What it buys is placement. It has no say over coverage, conclusions, citations, or whether a page exists in the first place. No other subject on this site carries paid placement in any form. The same disclosure sits on privacy and terms, so it reaches a reader ahead of the link itself.

Photographs

One per article, used once and never again anywhere. Public domain, CC0 and Creative Commons Attribution are the only licenses accepted. The house crop and grade would count as an adaptation, so ShareAlike and NonCommercial terms are refused. Nothing is generated, composited, or retouched until it shows what the camera did not.

A photograph here is chosen for atmosphere. It proves nothing the article states, and it should not be read as depicting a particular company, agency, facility or case. Photographer, source and license for each image sit at image credits.

Corrections inside the text

An error is repaired inside the article, not recorded somewhere else. Where the repair moves the substance — a day count, a forum, a standard of review, a consequence — the page reports that in its own words. How to send one in is at corrections, and how we work describes how a page is built to begin with.