Editorial standards

These are enforced, not aspirational. A record that fails any of the sourcing rules below cannot be published — the check runs on every path that writes to the corpus, and again nightly across everything already published.

Default to the record

Statements are drawn from court filings, dockets, opinions, transcripts, and agency records. Anything outside the record is the exception and is marked as such.

Default to alleged

A charge remains an allegation until a citation supports a finding, regardless of how widely it has been reported.

A reversal is never optional

A finding later vacated or reversed is marked vacated. Leaving it as found is the precise failure this platform exists to correct.

Attribution is named

A claim by a party names that party. "The government alleged" is a fact about who spoke; an unattributed claim is not publishable.

Every established fact rests on a primary source

Secondary reporting can support an allegation. It cannot establish a finding.

Citations must resolve

Every source is checked when the record is written. A source that has never resolved cannot support an established fact, and a link that later dies is shown as dead rather than presented as live.

Opinion is rare and gated

Editorial voice requires a named human author and the disclosed facts it rests on. It is visibly marked and never mixed into the record.

Nothing is silently omitted

Sections are documented, positively established as not applicable, or explicitly marked not yet documented. Absence of information is never presented as information.

No inference from silence

We never infer guilt or innocence from what is missing, and never fabricate a citation.

How records are produced and which cases we select is described in methodology.