How we read the law
Every legal statement on this site carries the section it rests on and the date that section was read. This page says what stands behind that sentence.
What counts as an official source
A state legislature, a court, or the U.S. Government Publishing Office. Aggregator sites are not used as the source of record, not because they are careless, but because a citation should point at the body that enacted the text.
What a jurisdiction must satisfy to be marked « read »
- A known section was actually retrieved from that official source, not a home page returning 200.
- The citation, the address and the date of reading are recorded.
- Anything quoted is checked word for word against that text.
49 of 52 jurisdictions meet that today. The rest are listed as gaps on the coverage page, each with the reason it is still unread.
Why a gap is shown instead of a neighbouring state's rule
Because a rule read in one state is a fact about that state. A fifty-state chart assembled from memory is the single most dangerous thing a site like this could publish, and it is the thing this method exists to prevent.
What can go wrong, and what is done about it
The failure that matters is not a wrong citation, it is a right citation with a summary that goes past it. So every legal answer shows the quote above the plain-language line, and the line is held to the quote. Quotes are re-checked against the live official text when the corpus is audited.