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How We Source

Primary law first, agency guidance second, and a short list of things we will not cite.

The hierarchy

Sources are used in this order, and an article is expected to reach at least the second tier:

  1. Primary law. The statute, the regulation, the court rule, or the published decision itself.
  2. The administering agency. The body that actually runs the program — its policy manual, forms, and official instructions.
  3. Uniform acts and official commentary. Useful for state-law subjects where the same model text has been adopted in many states, with the caveat that adoption is never uniform in practice.
  4. Courts' own public materials. Self-help centers, clerks' instructions, and procedural guides published by the judiciary.

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

What we do not cite

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

How links are chosen

We link to stable, top-level official pages rather than deep paths that agencies reorganise. A link to an agency's page for a form will still work after the agency redesigns its site; a link to a PDF buried three directories down usually will not. Where a specific regulation matters, we cite it by number so the citation survives even if the URL does not.

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 block automated requests, so a failed automated check is treated as a flag for a human to look at, not as proof that a page is gone — and we record the difference honestly in the build report rather than silently swapping in a different link.

Volatile facts

Some things change faster than any publication can track: fee schedules, processing times, benefit amounts, and rules currently being litigated. For those we describe the mechanism, date our statement in the text, and send you to the source that carries the live number or the current status. That is more useful than a figure that was right when it was typed.