About
About Plain Docket
A collective desk, one address, and a way of working this page sets out in full.
What Plain Docket is
An independent reference publication in plain English about the public legal record in Maine: what a public record is and how a request for one proceeds, what a state human rights commission does with a complaint, what a professional licensing board publishes, how a written decision is assembled, and how the courts are arranged. It is written by a collective desk, which signs "The Plain Docket desk". There are no individual bylines because there are none, not because they are hidden.
What it does with a procedure
It describes the published steps in the impersonal, and stops there. It reads no documents, weighs no facts, estimates no outcomes and recommends no one. There is no contact form anywhere on it. A page that describes how a procedure works is not a service, and this one is careful never to behave like one.
How it is written
Every deadline, fee, statutory citation and quoted phrase on this site is taken from a named published source, and the text says which source and on what date it was read. Where a source is silent, the text says the source is silent instead of supplying a plausible number. Where two sources differ, both are given. The illustrations are illustrative compositions produced for this site; they document no real place, document or person, and each caption says so.
Corrections
Errors of fact are worth reporting and are the only thing this desk can usefully act on: a wrong date, a superseded figure, a citation that no longer matches the text, a broken link. The address is [email protected]. A report that names its source is dealt with first, because it is the only kind that can be checked without redoing the work. The desk cannot answer questions about anyone's own situation, and will not try.
The two pages that complete this one
What this site collects about a visitor, which is close to nothing, is set out in the privacy notice. Who publishes, under what terms the text may be reused, and where the responsibility for an error sits, are in the legal notice.