Standards
Editorial standards
A reference work is only worth as much as the reader's ability to check it. This page states what each kind of page on this site claims to be, what has to happen before it is published, and what we do when it turns out to be wrong.
Sourcing
Sources are ranked, and a lower tier never silently overrides a higher one. Every structured field carries at least one source — an entity with none cannot be published at all, which is enforced by the publish gate rather than left to a checklist. Where a source supports one particular field, it is attached to that field rather than to the page as a whole, so a reader checking the minimum age is not handed a bibliography.
| Tier | What it is | What it may be used for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Primary | Statutes, juvenile and criminal codes, law reports, constitutional texts. | Any structured field. A figure sourced here is recorded with the provision that sets it. |
| 2. Government | Ministry and judiciary publications, official statistics, state reports to treaty bodies. | Any structured field where the primary text is unavailable to us, or where the statute delegates the figure. |
| 3. Treaty body | UN Committee on the Rights of the Child concluding observations and general comments. | Authoritative for the international standards themselves. Corroboration only for a national figure. |
| 4. Academic | Peer-reviewed comparative law scholarship. | Interpretation of a provision, and flagging a figure that needs re-checking. Rarely the sole source for a value. |
| 5. NGO and news | Monitoring organisations, legal charities, reported journalism. | Detecting that something has changed. Never the final authority for what it changed to. |
Reference and opinion are separated
The tracker states what the law is. Opinion argues about what it should be. These are different activities and they are not mixed in the same page: the structured record contains no advocacy, and an opinion piece is labelled as such in its address, its heading and its structured data. There are 5 editorial sections and each one makes a different claim on the reader.
This site has a view — that children in the justice system are children first — and it is not concealed. What is not permitted is letting it colour a structured field. If our position and the statute disagree, the statute is what gets recorded.
| Section | What it claims to be | Review before publication |
|---|---|---|
| Tracker (jurisdictions, cases, reforms) | A statement of the law, with a source and a verification date on every field. | Sourced against tier 1 or 2, anonymisation sign-off, publish gate. |
| Explainers | A statement of how the law works, in plain language. | Named legal-accuracy review, recorded against the post. Enforced in code, not by habit. |
| Research | Original analysis built from this site’s own data. | Method stated in the piece; the underlying dataset is downloadable so the result can be reproduced. |
| News | A report of a dated development, attributed to the source reporting it. | A source URL is mandatory. A news item cannot be published without the thing it is reporting. |
| Opinion | An argued position held by its author. Not a statement of what the law is. | Named legal-accuracy review of the factual claims. The argument itself is the author’s. |
Legal-accuracy review
Explainers and opinion state or argue the law, so both require a recorded legal-accuracy review before publication: a named person, stored against the post. This is enforced by validation — an attempt to publish either without it is rejected, not warned about. A requirement that depends on someone remembering is a requirement that fails on the day somebody is in a hurry.
Review here means checking that the factual claims about the law are right and current. It does not mean the reviewer agrees with an opinion piece, and it never converts one into legal advice.
Dating and revision
Every structured field carries an "as of" date: the date a person last checked that value against its source. It is not the date the law changed and not the date the page was rebuilt. Serving a page does not refresh it.
History is appended, never overwritten. When a tracked value moves, the previous value, the new value and the date are all recorded, and the change appears in the timeline. A reader who wants to know what this site said last year can find out.
Corrections
A report is checked against the source supplied and against the source already attached to the field. A correction is never applied on assertion alone — including our own. If the record is wrong, the value changes and the change is dated.
A material correction — one that changes what a reader would conclude — is marked on the page itself. A typographical fix is not, because marking everything equally would bury the corrections that matter. Where the record turns out to have been right, the person who reported it is told why, if they left an address.
Use of AI
Language models are used in building this site, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What matters is the boundary, so here it is precisely.
They are used for:
- Drafting and editing the software that runs the site.
- Summarising a source a human has selected, as a first draft a human then checks against that source.
- Finding candidate material — spotting that a jurisdiction may have amended something, so a person can go and verify it.
- Copy-editing: structure, clarity, consistency of terminology.
They are not used for:
- Generating a legal fact. No age, date, citation, holding or statutory reference enters the record because a model produced it. Every one is read off a source by a person.
- Supplying a citation. A model-generated citation is checked against the report it names before it is stored, because a plausible-looking citation to a case that does not exist is the characteristic failure of these systems.
- Deciding that text is free of identifying detail. That decision is a named human's.
- Writing an opinion piece. An argued position needs somebody who holds it.
The rule underneath all of that: a model may help a person do the work faster, and may never be the reason something is true. If a claim on this site cannot be traced to a source a human read, it should not be here — and if you find one that cannot, that is a correction we want.
Independence
No advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate arrangements, no institutional or governmental funding. Nothing on this site is paid for by anyone with an interest in what it says. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the about page before it happens.