Editorial standards
These are the rules the site holds itself to, stated so a reader can check whether we are keeping them. They are enforced in code wherever code can enforce them, which is most of the way but not all of it.
The approved source list
For court records, the engine does not decide whether to believe a story. It decides whether to believe a publisher, and only publishers on a hand-maintained list. Sources are held in two tiers.
- National judgment databases: The court's own text of the judgment. For the United Kingdom that is Find Case Law, published by The National Archives.
- Courts and judiciary: Judiciary and court service sites publishing judgments and sentencing remarks.
- Prosecutors: Prosecution services, for the charge and the disposition.
- Police, customs and drug authorities: Official enforcement releases, for seizures and arrests.
- Legislation and sentencing bodies: Official statute databases and statutory sentencing bodies, for the provision charged.
One qualifying official source of that kind is enough to support a record. Established news outlets sit in a second tier, and two of them are required, they must agree, and they must be independent of each other. Two mastheads owned by the same publisher, or the same wire copy reprinted twice, count as one source and are rejected as corroboration.
Off-list sources are not cited. Forums, blogs, aggregators, social posts and content farms can be followed as a lead to something citable and are then discarded. They never appear on a record. For the United Kingdom our approved list is entirely official: it holds no news outlets at all, so a UK record has to rest on an official document.
For non-legal drug information the site keeps a separate sourcing policy. See how we source.
No individual is ever named
No court record on this site names any individual, in any field, ever. People appear only as anonymized descriptions, for example a local man, 26 at the time of the offence. This is not a preference we apply case by case. It is a check every record has to pass, and it is run a second time by separate code immediately before publication, over the field that renders as the who.
We anonymize even where the source document names the person and even where the name is a matter of public record. Our purpose is to describe what a law does, and that does not require us to identify anybody.
No actionable use guidance
This site is written to reduce harm, not to assist use. Across the site, including every court record:
- No doses. We do not publish quantities as guidance for taking anything. Where a weight appears in a court record it is the weight the court attributed to the offence, quoted with the hedge the document used.
- No combinations. We do not tell anyone what to mix or how.
- No sourcing. We do not say where to obtain anything, and we do not link to anywhere that does.
Nothing unverifiable publishes
Where we cannot verify something, we leave it out and say so, rather than filling the gap with a plausible value. A missing field withholds the whole record.
- Where a record says a sentence sat at a legal floor or ceiling, that is a quotation from the document. We never conclude it ourselves.
- A figure keeps the document's own hedge. Not less than 367.2g and 367.2g are different claims and we do not upgrade one into the other.
- A drug named in passing in a judgment, in a cited precedent or in a statutory schedule is not that case's drug, and a record that treats it as one is withheld.
- The absence of a case on a page means only that we have not verified one. It never means none exists, which is why an unverified page shows nothing rather than an empty state.
The full process, including the twenty-one automated checks and the append-only audit log, is on the court case verification methodology page.
Reporting an error
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and that includes a record you think should not be published at all.
- How to report it. Email corrections@2cb.com with the page URL and what is wrong. If you can point at the document that shows it, that speeds everything up, but it is not required.
- What happens next. We re-read the cited source ourselves. If the record does not match its source, or the source does not support it, the record is corrected or withdrawn.
- Corrections are appended, not erased. A correction is logged as a new entry pointing back at the one it replaces, so the earlier version and the reason it changed both stay on the record.
- A record can be withdrawn even though it passed. Passing every automated check is not proof that a record is true. A record found to be wrong is retracted by a person, and no re-run reverses that.