You never have to guess what we know.

What the columns mean

Statutes · Regulations

Codified law as the jurisdiction publishes it, section by section, each carrying its source URL, retrieval time and content hash.

Guidance

Sub-regulatory material — interpretive guidelines and survey procedures. Not binding law, and labelled as such in every response.

Jury instructions

Pattern instructions as approved for use at trial, split to the individual instruction and carrying its official notes on use alongside — never merged into the text a judge would read to a jury. Instructions the drafting committee has reserved are served as reserved rather than quietly omitted, and an instruction for which no standard text is provided says so.

Rules

Court rules of procedure, evidence and appellate practice, as promulgated for each court — a rule that binds a court, not an instruction read to a jury, and counted separately for that reason.

Guidelines

The United States Sentencing Guidelines Manual, one row per guideline section and one edition per November 1. It sits apart from Guidance because it is not sub-regulatory: a federal court must calculate the guideline range, and the commentary is authoritative.

Validity dates for jury instructions come from the compilation the publisher dated, so “the instruction as published in that compilation” is answerable with a hash for every one of them. A minority carry their own amendment date in the text. Point-in-time history accrues from the first compilation we hold forward; we do not reconstruct what an instruction said before that, and we never resolve a citation to a nearest edition.

How we retrieve: our crawler names itself and its contact address, reads robots.txt first and paces its requests. A handful of sites refuse every automated client whatever it says about itself — the New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota and Kansas courts, two California superior courts, Massachusetts, Kansas Medicaid, Tennessee, Washington and North Carolina among them, and the administrative rules sites of the Oregon, Tennessee and Arizona Secretaries of State. We read those public pages through a hosted real browser, under the same robots.txt rules and at the same pace, as a person would; any publisher that admits our crawler directly comes off that list. Where a site's pages refuse us but the publisher's own data service behind them admits our crawler, as Oklahoma's administrative code does, we read that service, identified, and use no browser.

robots.txt binds us everywhere except at these official sources, which disallow the documents we serve from them. We read them anyway, at a polite pace, and will stop at any publisher's request. Where only a folder or a file is disallowed, the exception covers that and nothing else.

• Ohio: codes.ohio.gov, the Revised Code, Administrative Code and Constitution.
• Nevada: www.nevadamedicaid.nv.gov, the Medicaid Services Manual.
• Federal courts: the Seventh Circuit (www.ca7.uscourts.gov, its document folder); the District of Nevada (www.nvd.uscourts.gov); the Southern District of California (www.casd.uscourts.gov, its document folder); the District of South Carolina (www.scd.uscourts.gov, its judges' form orders).
• Alaska: courts.alaska.gov, the mediation program pages.
• Arizona: www.appeals2.az.gov, Division Two of the Court of Appeals.
• Connecticut: www.jud.ct.gov, info.jud.ct.gov and civilinquiry.jud.ct.gov, two Superior Court e-filing document lists.
• Florida: the six district courts of appeal, 1dca.flcourts.gov through 6dca.flcourts.gov, and their document host flcourts-media.flcourts.gov.
• Georgia: www.gasupreme.us, the uniform court rules folder.
• Michigan: www.courts.michigan.gov, including the model civil and criminal jury instructions.
• Minnesota: mncourts.gov, the courts' document folder.
• New York: iapps.courts.state.ny.us, the NYSCEF e-filing site.
• North Carolina: www.ncappellatecourts.org, the appellate e-filing site.
• Oklahoma: www.oscn.net, the court rules.
• Pennsylvania: www.pacodeandbulletin.gov, the Pennsylvania Code's court rules.
• South Carolina: www.sccourts.org, the court rules and orders.

We also read some official publishers whose terms of use bar automated collection: the State Bar of Wisconsin's court-rules directory, the Hawaii Judiciary under the State portal's terms, the Connecticut Judicial Branch, the Indiana courts, the Arkansas courts' rules on Lexum, the New Mexico Rules Annotated (court rules and uniform jury instructions) on NMOneSource, also Lexum's, Baltimore County's circuit court pages and files and the NYSCEF user manual. What they publish is court rules, jury instructions, orders and procedure; we read it at the same pace and under the same robots.txt rules.

A few administrative-code chapters, chiefly hospice licensing and Medicaid hospice rules, we serve from Cornell's Legal Information Institute copy rather than the state's: Texas, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Hawaii, whose publishers refuse our crawler or publish only through a vendor, and Nebraska, whose official site's terms forbid republication. Every such row names LII as its source and the state's official publisher, and gives the date LII last regenerated the page.

Where a publisher refuses our crawler altogether, we may ask a commercial extraction service (Parallel) to read the page, only to confirm which edition is current and where the official document lives. Nothing it returns is served: the text we serve comes from the publisher's own document, or the LII copy named above, retrieved by us or supplied by hand.

A jurisdiction and material we do not carry answers not_carried, with a reason — a stated gap, distinct from no_edition_on_file, which means we carry the material but not that citation or date. The difference matters to an agent: one means stop, the other means look again.