About True Justice Record

A plain-language reference on proof in American law: what a document establishes, what a witness can be relied on for, and what happens when the record was never made.

Most writing about law is aimed at somebody who already knows the vocabulary. This library is aimed at the person underneath that: someone trying to work out how a system operates before deciding what to do inside it.

So each article takes a single question, says what the question is, gives the answer, and then marks the edges where the answer weakens. Paragraphs are kept short and the type is set loose on the page. Nothing gets a longer word than it needs.

Ten kinds of proof

Most legal writing is organized by area of law. This one is organized by the question underneath every area: what would establish this, and who has to establish it. A document, a person's account, a record somebody else holds, an opinion, a file on a phone, or nothing at all. Each of the ten below is a different answer to that question, and each fails in its own way.

• Documents and What They Prove — What a piece of paper establishes, what it merely suggests, and the formalities that decide which of the two it is
• Records Somebody Else Holds — How to reach a record that sits with an agency, an employer, a hospital or a bank, and what to do when the holder will not produce it
• Testimony and Credibility — What a person's account can establish, how it is tested, and why an honest witness and a reliable one are not the same thing
• Documents From Another Country — What a foreign record needs before an American decision-maker will rely on it, and what is available when the issuing country cannot produce it
• Evidence That Lives on a Phone — What a device actually holds, who is able to reach it, and why the screenshot everybody offers proves so little
• Opinion That Counts as Evidence — When a professional view becomes evidence rather than commentary, and what makes one opinion survive where another is excluded
• Who Must Prove It — Which side carries the burden, how convincing the proof has to be, and how cases are decided when nobody has proved anything
• Proving a Relationship — How a family tie is established on paper, and what is available when the paper does not exist or is not believed
• Proving Money — How income, assets and transfers are established, and why cash and informal arrangements are the hardest facts to prove
• When the Proof Does Not Exist — What is available when the record was never made, was destroyed on schedule, or is held by the person it would damage

This is a publication

True Justice Record does not practice law anywhere. Nothing here opens a file, takes an instruction, reviews a document or acquires a client, and reading an article puts you in no attorney-client relationship with anyone. Writing to the address on contact creates nothing of the kind. Advice is not what any of this is.

There is a hard limit on what any general article can do. It can lay out a rule and show how the pieces of a procedure connect. It cannot know the particular facts in front of you, and in questions of proof the particular facts decide everything. If a page here ever starts to sound like an offer to represent you, that page has failed, and hearing about it is genuinely useful.

Citations rather than credentials

Nothing carries a signature. You will find no writer biographies, no lists of qualifications, no reviewer stamps and no staff photographs. Any of that could be invented by anyone, which is precisely why it is absent.

The sources do that work instead. Under each article sit five to seven primary references: the statute, the regulation printed in the official code, whatever an agency actually puts into the hands of people who have to file, and the decisions where a phrase is genuinely fought over. That list appears below the last line of the article, so a reader who believes none of the prose can go straight to the law and check it.

The shape of an article

Question named, question answered, answer qualified. Anything that compares two or more routes goes into a table, since a reader holds a comparison better in rows than strung across three paragraphs. Dollar limits, day counts and section numbers appear exactly as their sources give them.

Where courts read a phrase differently from one another, or where an agency's own guidance is all that exists, the article says that outright instead of tidying the gap away.

Getting around

Everything written sits in the index, gathered by kind of proof. Beneath each headline you get three things: the subject, how long the article takes to read, and whether the point is decided by court rules, by agency practice, or by both. You will not find a date, and editorial standards explains that decision. The building of an article is described at how we work. Anything that looks wrong belongs at corrections.