How facts get here

Every deadline, dollar amount, and sequencing rule on this site is a row in a database of verified obligations. The pages are generated from those rows. This page describes the pipeline, and it describes only what the pipeline actually does.

Proposition-level citation

Each obligation is decomposed into propositions: the duty, its clocks, its consequences, its exceptions, its ordering rules. Each proposition carries its own source row with the citation, the URL actually read, the exact quoted text, and the date of access. The site currently renders 85 obligations resting on 89 distinct source documents; every fact on a state page links its source, and the quoted statutory or agency text sits one click away under each citation.

Primary sources, declared honestly

Statutes are read from the state's official publication wherever one is reachable. Some states publish their code only through a gated commercial service; there the citation names the mirror actually read, records the mirror's own currency date, and the section number is cross-checked against a fresher published edition. The declared-mirror convention is visible in the citation text itself, so a reader always knows which document supplied the words.

Verification dates, shown on the fact

Every source row carries the date it was last read against the live text, and every rendered fact shows that date. A fact whose verification has aged is aging in the open.

What the census could support, and only that

Where a source supported a duty as stated, the duty is encoded as stated. Where a source supported something narrower, the record says so inline. Where an instrument could be located by inference alone, the row stays unencoded and the gap is logged in the dataset's errata rather than papered over. Unsourced amounts stay unsourced instead of becoming plausible numbers.

Enforcement at build time

The site refuses to hold facts in templates. A build gate scans every handwritten template and content file for time-interval and dollar patterns and fails the build when one appears; facts reach pages only through database rows. A second gate validates that every cited URL appears in the dataset's committed source manifest, and the dataset itself ships with acceptance tests that must pass before a build starts.

Quarterly re-verification

The dataset carries a standing re-verification protocol, run against each obligation's review date. In order: the local evidence tree (a SHA-256 manifest over every captured source document) is verified before any comparison, so drift in the copy is caught before it can masquerade as drift in the law; every source URL is re-probed, with the handful that require a rendered client or sit behind unstable hosts tracked explicitly; citation currency is confirmed, including section renumbering of the kind that silently strands pinpoints; and records whose live text changed are re-encoded behind the same acceptance gates.

Corrections

A claimed error is treated as a defect report: the source is re-read, the record is corrected or the correction is declined against the quoted text, and either way the dataset's errata records the outcome.