How we cite the law
People download these guides and take them into board meetings. That only works if a citation means something. Here is what ours mean, and what we do to keep them honest.
A citation names the section that actually contains the rule
The failure we guard hardest against is not an invented statute number — those are easy to spot. It is a real section from the wrong act, or the right act’s wrong subsection, attached to a rule it does not contain. It reads as verified because the number resolves. Texas notice deadlines live in §209.0056, not §209.0058; Nevada’s electronic ballots are NRS 116.31034, not the criminal-penalty section next to it. When we cite, we cite the section we read.
We read the primary source, not a summary of it
Statutes are checked against the legislature’s own text — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, flsenate.gov, statutes.capitol.texas.gov, mgaleg.maryland.gov and their equivalents. Law-firm client alerts and vendor blogs are useful for finding a change; they are never the authority we cite. A number that only appears in secondary sources does not ship.
We separate the default from the ceiling, and the window from the notice
Most corrections we make are of this kind. Colorado’s 67% is a cap on what a declaration may demand, not the default for amending one — the default is more than 50%. Nevada’s 15 days is how long an owner has to return a ballot, not how far ahead notice goes out. Getting these backwards can lead a board to declare a measure failed that passed.
HOA law and condominium law are different bodies of law
They are routinely blurred, including by us in the past. Florida’s 60-day first notice, its candidate-notice step and its impartial election committee are Chapter 718 condominium rules. Chapter 720 sends HOA director elections to the association’s own governing documents. Where a page speaks to only one of the two, it says so.
Numbers we cannot source, we do not publish
A statistic keeps the attribution it was born with. Where we quote a figure from one community’s reported spending, we say it is one community’s and name the report — we do not promote it to a national average, and we do not attach an industry body’s name to a number that body never published.
Nothing here is legal advice, and the citations are the point
We publish citations so you can check us rather than trust us. Your governing documents — which we have not seen — often control, and statutes are amended. Read the section, then talk to a lawyer licensed in your state before you act.
When this was last checked
The 50-state rules corpus was last reviewed end to end on 2026-07-24. The most recent citation-by-citation audit of the checklist, the state notes and the statute-heavy posts ran on 2026-08-24. A green build is not a verification: our automated tests check the shape and internal consistency of a citation, never whether the statute says what we claim. Only a person reading the statute does that.
Found something wrong?
Tell us and we will fix it and say what changed. Email [email protected]. If you are checking a specific state, start with the state rules directory.