How this site works

How we source and verify what's on this site

Who compiles a fact, who checks it, and what happens when it turns out to be wrong. This page is the short version; the linked policies are the binding ones.

Every fact follows the same path

A researcher reads the primary source wherever it can be reached: the statute, the regulation, the agency rule, or the published decision, and records the citation, the effective date, the link, and the operative language in this site's internal source register. Where an official source cannot be reached directly, the record says so rather than hiding it, and the fact stays unpublished.

Then a second researcher is handed the question and the state, and nothing else. Not the first answer, not the first researcher's notes. They go to the primary source and derive the fact again. The two derivations are compared. If they agree, the fact publishes. If they disagree, it does not, and it goes to a third pass with both readings on the table; anything still unresolved stays "Research pending" and is logged as unresolved. Before a fact renders, its citation is checked once more against the text the government is publishing today, because statutes and agency rules move underneath a citation that used to be right.

A verified fact renders with the date it was checked and a link to what it was checked against. Until it clears, it reads "Research pending," which means we have not published an answer yet, not that the answer is no, and the page it sits on is marked noindex so a search engine is not invited to a page that has nothing verified on it yet.

What this is not

This site is not reviewed by an attorney. Two careful readers of primary sources are not a lawyer, and we are not going to imply otherwise anywhere on this site. An attorney brings judgment about how case law and agency practice change what a statute appears to say on its face; that is exactly what our process does not produce. What it produces instead is a fact you can check: every claim links its source with the source's effective date and the date we last read it. If this site ever earns enough to engage a licensed reviewing attorney for a state, that review gets recorded and named on the pages it covers, and this page will say so. It has not happened.

Read the full editorial policy for the complete rules, including how independence is protected when the people verifying facts also run the business, what happens when the underlying law changes, and how facts get demoted back to "Research pending" if they age past their recheck date.

Where things actually stand

States researched

50 / 50

Recorded in the source register; gaps in primary-source access are flagged, not hidden.

States verified

0 / 50

Rows of the 50-state comparison matrix that cleared two independent derivations from the primary source. The Texas guide's own facts verified separately on August 24, 2026; matrix rows verify in waves.

Texas decisions read

866 / 867

Every published TxDMV decision document, read end to end. The two numbers differ because one decision is published twice under two filenames; each decision is counted once.

These three numbers are computed from this site's own data files at build time; they update automatically as verification lands, they are not a hand-typed status line someone forgot to update.

Source records

Every source this site draws a fact from is registered before its first use: what it is, what we take from it, the license or legal basis for using it, and a running change log against it. That register is an internal document, not a page on this site; it exists so a sponsor doing diligence, a future editor, an attorney reading us skeptically, or you can audit exactly where a fact came from. It also records both verification passes for every published fact and where they disagreed. If you want to know the source behind a specific claim, ask us and we will tell you.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or misattributed, we want to know before a reader relies on it. Read the corrections and removal policy for how to report it and what happens next.

Who compiles this

The Lemon Law Atlas research team is the researcher of record for the 50-state statute matrix and the Texas wing. No reviewing attorney has been engaged for any jurisdiction yet; recruiting one for Texas, on a flat fee and with no sponsorship conflict, is this site's own next step before anything here can render as a reviewed answer.