How we check
Every fact on this site points at a publisher, and every publisher has a note saying what it cannot be cited for. That is the whole method. The rest is arithmetic and discipline.
33
countries covered
15
topics answered
6866
quotations checked character for character
211
publishers, each with a note on what it cannot answer
2026-10-08
last full re-check
Five kinds of authority
An instrument published here takes legal effect on publication. This is where the law becomes the law.
Maintains the current text of the law as amended, so you can read a provision as it stands today rather than reconstructing it from amendments.
The body that applies the rule and decides applications. It publishes what it requires, which is authoritative about its own practice but is not the text of the law.
A court, which decides what an instrument means. Its answers bind, but only on the questions actually put to it.
Describes what others have done. Useful as a signal that something has moved, never as proof that it has.
What the machine check does not catch
The verbatim check confirms that a quotation matches the text at the source, character for character. It cannot tell whether the instrument is still in force, whether a later decree amended the article, or whether we quoted the right article in the first place. The Argentine decree correction in the record was exactly that failure: quotations that passed the check while being attached to the wrong instrument, because the articles belong to the law being amended rather than to the decree amending it.
It also cannot read images. A quotation recovered from a scan is marked as one, and Ecuador's consular tariff is the current example: the fee table is a picture in every copy published, so no figure in it can be checked at all. Every correction is on the record.