The official sources, and the line this site does not cross

Every procedure described on Plain Docket is published by the body that operates it, at no charge, on a public website. Reading the original is always better than reading a summary of it, including this one. This folio is the guide to that rule. It holds two pieces, one on where the official text sits and one on what a site like this can honestly do with it, and it takes them in that order, because the limits make more sense once the sources are real.

Why the primary source wins

A summary is fixed at the date it was written; the source is not. Statutes are amended, agency pages are rewritten, fees change. This site dates every figure it quotes precisely so that a reader can tell how old the summary has become.

The first piece, the official sources, follows three pages in turn: the statute page, the agency site and the board docket. All three are free to read, and on each of them a number arrives attached to the subsection that publishes it. That attachment is the first thing a summary drops. A figure quoted with its subsection can be checked against the law as it stands; a figure quoted alone can only be repeated.

What can a reference site do for a reader?

A reference site can quote the deadline, the fee and the citation, with the date it was read. That is the honest extent of what it can do. What it cannot do is just as definite: it cannot read a reader’s papers, weigh a case, or tell anyone what to do. A reader who arrives holding an actual case has already walked past the end of what a page can carry. The folio’s second piece, what a reference site cannot do, sets the limit out in one place.

Where a reference site has to stop

Explaining how a published procedure works is writing. Telling a particular person what to do about their own situation is legal work, done by people who are admitted to a bar and answerable for it. Plain Docket does the first and never the second, and this folio is the page that says so plainly.

The step that follows from all this is small. When a number quoted here starts to matter, open the page named beside it: the statute page, the agency site or the board docket. Find the subsection the number came from, and see whether the two still agree. The official page wins, every time, including against this one.