US · guidance
Justice Manual § 1-19.210
General Principles
Criminal and civil enforcement actions brought by the Department must be based on violations of applicable legal requirements, not mere noncompliance with guidance documents issued by federal agencies, because guidance documents cannot by themselves create binding requirements that do not already exist by statute or regulation. The Department must establish a violation by reference to statutes and regulations. The Department may not bring actions based solely on allegations of noncompliance with guidance documents. Thus, the Department should not treat a party’s noncompliance with a guidance document as itself a violation of applicable statutes or regulations.
The Department may continue to rely on agency guidance documents for purposes that do not treat such documents as creating by themselves binding requirements that do not already exist by statute or regulation, including evidentiary purposes that are otherwise lawful and consistent with the Federal Rules of Evidence.
The following sections provide examples that are intended to serve as specific, but not exhaustive, illustrations of appropriate uses of guidance documents.
Provenance
- Source
- justice.gov
- Retrieved
- 2026-09-20
- Edition
- jm-2026-09-20
- Content hash
a4bdadcb01428a46007eb1c6f0051ff2c0f0931a5b682bb039e2771e06ab5142
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Unofficial copy of government-published law, reproduced from official sources with full provenance. Not an official publication; verify against official sources before relying on it in a filing. Records in the 'guidance' corpus, and only that corpus, are sub-regulatory (interpretive guidelines, survey procedures) and are not binding law. Validity bounds follow each jurisdiction's declared temporalBasis.