GroundRules - US Law Text

Per-source coverage: what we host, section counts, current-through or vintage, last_verified, and a stale flag for any source the recurring verify has proven behind its upstream. Machine-generated from the build manifest; never hand-typed. Absence from this list means we do not host that jurisdiction's text, not that no law exists there.

Resolve an address or lat/lon to its full jurisdiction stack: federal, state, county, place, each with its code sources (name, publisher, official URL, current-through, whether we host its text). Unincorporated areas get the county code with no city code; about half of US municipalities publish no code online, and the answer says so and points at where the code lives if anywhere.

Fetch full verbatim text by id or citation, or pass references for a batch of up to 10. Each batch item has its own result/error. Includes provenance (official source URL, current-through or vintage label, retrieval time), parent path, and prev/next siblings. The text is reproduced exactly as published by the official source; nothing is added or removed except publisher editorial matter, which we never carry.

Search original law by topic, question, or citation. Exact citations resolve directly. Scoped by jurisdiction or source ids (e.g. us, us-tx; us-cfr scopes to the CFR alone, us covers both the US Code and the CFR) or by an address (the address is resolved first, then the search covers exactly its stack's hosted sources). Results are verbatim snippets with citation, official source URL, retrieval time, and a current-through or vintage label adjacent to every snippet; a hit whose source has fallen behind its upstream carries stale:true. Vintage-labeled text is a dated snapshot, not current law. meaning_only:true means no section matched a word of the query, so every hit is only the nearest in meaning and may be unrelated. Requested ids we do not host are named in the response note; law_coverage lists what is hosted.