Editorial standards. How we stay neutral.
Constilumen is a fact tool. It shows what was decided, enacted and written, and links to where it came from. These standards keep it that way, and readers can hold us to them.
No position
Constilumen does not argue that any decision was right or wrong, that any era was better or worse, or that the country is or is not in crisis. It does not rank presidents, parties or Justices. Where reasonable people disagree, the record of what happened is shown and the disagreement is left to the reader.
Words we use, and words we don’t
We describe actions in the terms of the record: signed, held, ratified, invoked, repealed. We do not apply labels such as fascist, authoritarian, radical or extremist to any person, party, government or era. Those words appear on Constilumen only as terms people printed, measured on the Language page, or inside quotations attributed to their source.
Where a historical judgment has itself become part of the record, as when the Supreme Court wrote that Korematsu “was gravely wrong the day it was decided,” we quote it and attribute it.
Symmetry
One test decides what appears in each layer, and it is the same in 1798 and today. An emergency power invoked by one administration is listed by the same rule as one invoked by another. Expansions of rights and restrictions of rights are held to the same standard of evidence. Before an entry is added, we check that its comparable counterparts in other eras are present too.
The recent past
Recent events are where neutrality is hardest and where the record is least settled. For the last decade we include only what is documented by an official source (a decision, a statute, a proclamation, a congressional record), and we describe it in the plainest terms available. We do not include pending cases or contested claims about ongoing events.
Sources
Every entry links to a primary or official source: the Court’s opinion, the statute, the National Archives, the Federal Register, the congressional record, or an official history office. Downloaded data names its source, query and retrieval date in the file. Where a source is secondary, it is labeled.
Independence
Constilumen is made by Stacklumen. It carries no advertising and accepts no sponsorship from political organizations. Nobody outside the editorial process can add, remove or reword an entry. Corrections are welcome from anyone, judged on the evidence, and logged publicly.