What Are the Authorities?
The authorities are the catalogue of case law, legislation, and codes the toolkit cites. Each entry links to its source and carries a legal-review date, so a claim can be checked and a decision defended by reference.
What It Is
The Legal Spine of the Toolkit
As of today, the catalogue holds 125 authorities. The owner's framing, verbatim: “authorities is a catalogue of case law, legislations, codes.” It is the legal spine the rest of the toolkit leans on — the instruments a policy, a risk call, or a defence is actually grounded in, gathered in one place rather than scattered across footnotes.
What It Does
Every Claim Traceable to a Source
Every authority the toolkit references is traceable to its source and carries a legal-review date. The mechanism is simple: claims in the tools are backed by citations that resolve to real, reviewable instruments — not assertion. So when a tool tells you a duty exists, or that a threshold is met, the citation behind it can be opened, read, and checked against the date it was last reviewed.
What You Get
A Checkable, Defensible Reference
Why the source link and the date both matter
Each entry links to its source and shows its legal-review date. The link lets you read the instrument for yourself; the date lets you see how fresh that reading is. Together they mean a claim can be checked and a decision defended by reference, not by reputation.
Who It's For
Who Uses the Authorities Library
Governance leads, policy owners, and anyone who needs to defend a decision by pointing at the actual instrument behind it — the Equality Act provision, the statutory code, the decided case — rather than asking a colleague to take it on trust.
Where It Fits
Where the Catalogue Lives
The catalogue lives at /authorities/ — that is the live list, with filtering by type, jurisdiction, and status. This page only explains the library. Tools that depend on it include Proportionality Check andDefensibility, both of which lean on authorities to back the calls they help you make.