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All guides

How We Source

Primary law first, the agency that runs it second — and an honest note about local rules.

The order we work in

  1. Primary law. The statute, the regulation, the court rule, or the ordinance itself.
  2. The body that administers it. The agency, department or clerk that actually runs the process.
  3. Uniform acts and model codes. Useful where the same text was adopted widely, with the standing caveat that adoption is never uniform.
  4. Courts' own public materials. Self-help centres and clerks' instructions.

Every guide carries at least four sources, of which at least two are primary or official.

The honest limit of a national site on local law

Most of what this site covers is decided by roughly nineteen thousand municipalities. No publication can cite every one of them, and any that appeared to would be inventing. So Citywide does something narrower and more useful: it explains the pattern — the two or three ways jurisdictions usually handle the question, what distinguishes them, and exactly which document you should look for in your own city. Then it tells you to go and read it.

That is why a guide will say "most cities require posted signage before a private tow, and yours will specify the sign's wording and placement in the towing chapter of the municipal code" rather than quoting one city's sign rules as if they were general.

What never gets cited

  • Other law-marketing sites and content farms.
  • A secondary summary standing in for a rule that is itself available.
  • Anything paywalled beyond the point a reader could check it.
  • Undated or unattributed material.

We link to stable, top-level official pages rather than deep paths that agencies reorganise, and cite provisions by number as well so the citation outlives the URL. External links open in a new tab with rel="noopener noreferrer".

Verification and its limits

Source links are checked automatically when the site is built. Several government hosts refuse automated requests outright, so a failed automated check is treated as a flag for a human rather than proof a page is gone — and where a host is unreachable we verify the underlying citation against an independent authority and record that we did.