Fit tiers, mixed authority, and boundaries

Confirmatory ruling

A ruling that affirms, recognizes, sustains, or materially supports a bounded issue claim, legal duty, protected interest, harm theory, institutional authority, remedy, or enforcement pathway.

Disconfirmatory / limiting ruling

A ruling that rejects, narrows, distinguishes, limits, reverses, undermines, denies standing, denies remedy, or otherwise creates contrary weight against a bounded issue claim.

Mixed ruling

Record the authority once in the registry and separately map its confirmatory and limiting propositions. Do not collapse mixed holdings into a single directional label.

No inferred legal claims

Do not infer a ruling from an issue title, geography, stakeholder identity, ideology, trend language, category proximity, or semantic similarity.

Minimum sourced record

Caption, citation, court or agency, jurisdiction, decision date, source URL, holding summary, issue claim linkage, authority level, precedential status, scope/limitations, and verification state.

Authority classification

Use binding, controlling, persuasive, administrative, settlement/order, non-precedential, vacated, overruled, superseded, historical adverse, or unknown as applicable.

Fit tiers

Direct; Strong analogue; Contextual; Historical adverse; Gap. A fit tier describes issue relevance, not publication eligibility.

Source preference

Official court, tribunal, legislature, agency, or government site first; then authenticated repositories such as Cornell LII, CourtListener/RECAP, or jurisdiction-specific legal databases.

Pinpoint rule

A candidate is not publication-ready until the exact opinion, page or paragraph locator, procedural posture, jurisdiction, currentness, and later treatment are verified.

Counterauthority rule

Every issue must seek limiting or contrary authority. Absence from the current corpus is a research gap, never proof that no contrary authority exists.

Analogue rule

A case involving a different population, institution, statute, jurisdiction, or remedy may be contextual or analogous, but must not be described as controlling the issue.

Currentness rule

Check later opinions, statutory amendments, supersession, vacatur, rehearing, appeal, implementation, and changes in remedial law before publication.

No legal advice

The workbook is a research crosswalk and intake fulfillment artifact. It is not legal advice and does not determine the outcome of any present dispute.

Publication control

All current ruling placements remain publication-blocked pending official-source, pinpoint, current-validity, applicability, counterauthority, and research publication checks.

Schema compatibility

The main issue-requests.v1 sheet retains the original 18-column schema; supplemental sheets carry the fulfillment, source, ruling, relationship, and governance metadata.

This workbook is a research fulfillment and research-routing artifact. It does not convert candidate evidence into legal advice, causal findings, or publication-ready conclusions.

Scope

Every original request is preserved. Each row now has a disposition, bounded response, source packet, confidence, publication status, unresolved gap, and provenance.

Meaning of “fulfilled”

The requested research need has been operationalized and assigned sources, measures, mechanisms, or candidate authorities. “Fulfilled” does not mean the underlying claim has been proven or approved for publication.

Evidence hierarchy

Official opinions, statutes, regulations, government datasets, intergovernmental sources, and documented methodologies are preferred. Independent scholarly and implementation records remain necessary for synthesis and challenge.

Ruling treatment

A ruling is recorded only when a named authority and source URL are available. Fit is labeled Direct, Strong analogue, Contextual, Historical adverse, or Gap. Analogy is never represented as controlling authority.

Confirmatory versus limiting

Confirmatory records may support a bounded proposition. Disconfirmatory or limiting records narrow jurisdiction, remedy, standing, causation, available relief, or the proposition itself.

Negative searches

A missing case is kept as an explicit ruling gap. No placeholder case name, citation, holding, or URL is invented.

Measures

Measure rows specify numerator, denominator, unit, geography, population, source, cadence, uncertainty, and comparability requirements. They do not invent trend values.

Relationships

The three nearest issue candidates are routing hypotheses based on shared sources and terminology. They are not findings of causation, intersectionality, or stakeholder alignment.

Tensions

Tension rows separate competing rights, institutional capacities, tradeoffs, and limiting authority. A tension statement is an analysis prompt rather than a normative verdict.

Publication control

All rows remain publication-blocked until claim-specific extraction, official-source and pinpoint verification, currentness, applicability, counterevidence, and research publication gates pass.

Population boundary

Issue titles do not prove that every named or implied population is affected uniformly. Population, subgroup, geography, period, and institution must be established by the cited source.

Currentness boundary

Legal and policy sources must be checked for later treatment, amendments, supersession, jurisdiction, and procedural posture before public use.

Completion date

2026-07-21

Workbook provenance

Original issue-requests.v1 intake plus the generated rulings-enriched workbook, enriched with a curated official/primary source registry, ruling authority registry, issue packets, and row-level dispositions.