GroundRules / methodology
We take law only from official publishers, over bulk downloads or public APIs that require no workaround to reach: the United States Code from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, federal regulations from the eCFR API, and state codes from each state's own bulk archive or API. Every upstream file is archived immutably (content-addressed), so every section traces to the exact file it came from. The live list of what we host, with counts and dates, is machine-generated at /v1/coverage and shown on the search page; nothing there is hand-typed.
Parsers keep the enacted words and drop publisher editorial matter: annotations, notes, and indexes are not the law and not ours to copy. Each build records what it dropped. We never add commentary of our own.
Every source's current-through value is read by machine from the upstream publisher at build time: a release-point label, an as-of date, or an edition year. A build that cannot derive it fails outright; we never guess a date. A recurring check compares our copy against the upstream signal, and a source that has fallen behind is marked stale in coverage and flagged on every response from it, next to the text. If a jurisdiction is ever served from a dated snapshot rather than a live feed, that text carries a vintage label next to it, everywhere it appears, and is never presented as current; whether any snapshot source is live right now is shown by /v1/coverage, never by this page.
A source build fails, rather than warns, on empty section bodies, a section count that drops against its own history, duplicate citations, or a failed currency read. A failed build never replaces the previous good one.
Search is plain full-text relevance ranking (SQLite FTS5, BM25) over citation, heading, and body. Ranking reflects how well the text matches the words you typed, never a judgment of importance. Search covers hosted sources only; an empty result never means no law applies.
Addresses are turned into state, county, and place using the US Census Bureau's public geocoder, then matched against a curated table of each jurisdiction's code sources. Where a level publishes no online code (about half of US municipalities), the response says so and points at where such codes usually live. If the geocoder is down, we return a plain error rather than a guess.
Summaries, plain-language rewrites, importance rankings, annotations, and advice. Compression is where honesty dies; the text speaks for itself.