About Observed.org

This site covers the parts of the law people actually collide with: an eviction notice taped to the door, a disability claim that came back denied, a final paycheck that never arrived, a traffic stop, a parent's estate. All of that law is public. Very little of it was written to be read by the people it governs.

So we go to the source and translate. When a guide here tells you what your state requires, that came out of the statute itself, or the agency's own rule, or the opinion a judge actually wrote. It did not come from someone else's article about the statute. Our editorial standards spell out what we require before publishing a claim about the law, and which numbers we leave out on purpose.

If you want the argument for why any of this matters, that's on our mission page. What follows here is the practical stuff.

Who publishes this

Observed.org is written and edited by Glenn Lyvers, who studied law at Regent University and is the masthead of Prolific Press, a publishing house in the United States. He is not an attorney, and Observed.org is not a law firm.

We'd rather be judged on the sourcing than on a credential, which is why the sourcing rules are published where you can hold us to them.

What we cover

Fourteen areas, all of them things people write to us about: housing and tenant law, employment, consumer and debt, bankruptcy, family law, criminal defense, immigration, disability benefits, workers' compensation, personal injury, estates and probate, small business, students and schools, and your constitutional rights during police encounters.

Most of these answers change at the state line. Where that happens we say so, and we name the states we have actually checked instead of implying we checked all fifty. Alongside the guides we keep a library of primary law you can read yourself, including every state constitution, plus free tools like a will template and an intestacy calculator.

What this site can't do

We publish legal information, not legal advice, and reading it doesn't make us your lawyers. Any real case turns on specifics a general guide has no way to know about, so treat what you find here as a starting point and take it to an attorney licensed in your state. The editorial standards go further into where those limits fall.

Contact and corrections

If something here is wrong, outdated, or just unclear, write to info@observed.org. We check reported errors against the source and fix what needs fixing; the corrections policy explains how that works.