No source, no rule, no page.
A jurisdiction page is publishable only when every visible legal value has an official source URL, a section locator, a short supporting excerpt, a human verification date, and a version ID. Missing coverage is suppressed instead of filled with generic text.
Primary government text first
The preferred source is the legislature, municipal code, ordinance library, or issuing agency. Official guidance may explain a process but does not silently replace controlling statute or ordinance text. Commercial summaries, blogs, and search snippets are not evidence for a published rule.
Stable official HTML or text that allows low-frequency automated checks.
Official source needing a careful parser, PDF extraction, or manual spot checks.
Bot-hostile, ambiguous, or contract-restricted source; manual retrieval only.
“Checked” and “verified” are different claims
Source checked records the most recent successful automated or manual retrieval of the monitored source. Human verified records the most recent review of the structured legal value by a person.
An unchanged source fingerprint may advance the source-check date. It never advances the human-verification date. This corrects a common automation error: treating “the web page looks the same” as “the legal conclusion was re-verified.”
Text changes create work; they do not create law
The monitor fetches approved sources at a low frequency, normalizes markup, fingerprints the relevant content, and archives the retrieval. A changed fingerprint creates a queue item with the old and new evidence. A failed fetch preserves the last known record and increases the failure count.
The monitor does not use a changed copyright notice, navigation menu, or unrelated code section as permission to publish a new rule. Classification may prioritize the queue, but publication remains a human decision.
Substantive changes require an explicit decision
A reviewer compares the current official text, previous source snapshot, existing structured value, effective-date language, cross-references, and visible qualifiers. The reviewer approves, edits, rejects, or keeps the record suppressed. No language model may approve a legal-data change.
Updates append; they do not erase
An approved change closes the prior rule version and creates a new current version. The public change log records the jurisdiction, field, old value, new value, source, effective date when known, review date, and release ID.
What this method cannot promise
Government sources can move, publish late, contain errors, or require context elsewhere in the law. Local rules may overlap state rules. A structured record cannot decide how law applies to a person’s facts. DwellDocket therefore reports its source and coverage boundary instead of guaranteeing completeness or legal outcomes.
Possible errors enter the same review queue as source changes. See the corrections policy.