The more dangerous failure

The failure everyone is guarding against is a citation checker that misses a fabricated authority. The more dangerous failure is the opposite: a checker that tells a lawyer a real provision is fake.

A missed fabrication is still read by a lawyer, and lawyers catch errors. A false accusation gets trusted, because it arrives with the authority of a safety check — and the better the tool’s reputation, the more damage it does. A sound authority is removed from a factum on the strength of a machine’s assessment, and nobody learns why.

This failure has a specific cause, and it is not poor accuracy.

Almost every citation is underspecified, and this is not carelessness; it is how lawyers write for one another. The jurisdiction is evident from the file, the date from the matter, the Act’s name from the argument around it. Between professionals who share that context, an abbreviated reference is precise. Software receives the reference with that context stripped away — so a section number that exists in both a federal and a provincial statute has no obvious owner, and a provision amended twice since the client acted has no obvious version.

The hard question is therefore not whether a provision exists, but which one was meant, and how much confidence that deserves.

Which is why "I cannot determine which provision you mean" and "this provision does not exist" must be different answers. A system that returns true or false has already collapsed them, and that collapse is where the false accusation comes from.

The answer must therefore carry its own justification: not simply a score, but an account of what the reference was matched against, what else it could have been, and where the system declined to decide. A lawyer asked to justify a citation, by a partner, a client, or the bench, must show that reasoning rather than cite a number. A vendor asked the same question by a law firm stands in precisely the same position.

MapleJuris was built to this requirement. Our API takes a statute, section and jurisdiction, and returns whether the reference resolves to a real provision in force, the exact statutory text, and the basis of the match. Ambiguity and alternative readings almost always arise from missing context rather than missing law, and since every resolution is a traversal of the graph, the point at which context ran out is recoverable. Rather than report only that we know or that we do not, the response names the detail required — a jurisdiction, a date, a fuller title — and supplying it completes the query. That distinction is the design.

Coverage today is federal and Ontario legislation. Other jurisdictions are not yet included, and we say so rather than guess: anything outside the corpus returns unsupported, never an approximation.

Our free tier provides up to 1,000 citation checks a month, with documentation for anyone integrating it: https://maplejuris.com/signup