Court opinions
Retrieved through CourtListener, which carries the corpus of the former Harvard Caselaw Access Project.
How Locke sources and checks legal research
What the answers are built from, how citations are verified, and where the coverage stops.
Where the law comes from.
State statutes
Search over published codified law, restricted to the requesting state's own code. Results from another state's code are discarded rather than shown.
Federal legislation
Bills and enacted law through the Congress.gov API. Bills are labeled as proposed measures, never as law.
Federal regulations
The Code of Federal Regulations through the eCFR API.
Citations are checked, not trusted.
After an answer is written, the authorities it asserts are matched against the sources actually retrieved. Anything that cannot be matched is reported on the answer rather than left to look settled.
- Only the research question reaches public search providers. Uploaded documents never do.
- An answer that cites nothing retrievable is flagged, not hidden.
- Statute retrieval is search over published law, so depth varies by state and topic.
Court structures are verified.
All 52 jurisdictions — 335 courts in total — were checked against each judiciary's own published structure, and each entry records the source it was checked against.