Built to be checked
The Institute's credibility rests on verifiability, not authority. Four rules govern everything we publish — and every one of them can be tested by any reader.
Verified corpus only
Research outputs draw exclusively on judicial decisions, statutes, regulations, official data, and vetted scholarship. Sources are identified; provenance is preserved. Materials that cannot be verified do not enter the corpus.
Pinpoint citation
Every substantive claim carries a citation to its source. Findings that cannot be sourced are not published.
Abstention
Where documentary support is insufficient, the Institute's tools and publications say so — explicitly — rather than estimate. An honest "the record does not establish this" is itself a research product.
Open data, open replication
Underlying datasets, indicators, and replication files are published without charge, enabling independent verification and secondary research by agencies, scholars, and journalists.
A closed-corpus design
The Comparative Jurisprudence Lab's research interface is engineered around the same four rules. It draws exclusively on the Lab's verified corpus; every answer carries pinpoint citations to that corpus; and where the corpus does not support an answer, the system abstains rather than generates. The full corpus and its metadata are published as open datasets, so the interface's behavior can be audited from the outside. The doctrinal repository is being built first; the interface follows in a later phase.
Editorial rule for comparative materials: U.S. constitutional and statutory authority is the exclusive governing framework for U.S. users. Foreign and international materials appear solely as contextual and scholarly resources, consistent with their status in U.S. adjudication.