Editorial Policy

People read this site when something serious has happened. That puts a duty on us to be right, and to be honest about how we know. This page is the whole method.

Primary sources only

Every BAC limit, jail range, fine, license suspension period, and lookback window on this site traces to one of two things: the statute text on the legislature’s own website, or an official state agency page (DMV, RMV, DPS, or the state courts).

Law-firm blogs, directories, and aggregator sites are used only to find the right statute — never as the source we cite. They are frequently out of date, and a summary of a summary is how errors propagate across this entire category of website.

The two-source rule

Every offense row must be supported by the statute text and one official agency page that agrees with it. Where the two conflict, we keep digging until it’s resolved and record how it was resolved in the page’s notes.

We publish ranges, not single numbers

Statutes give ranges and judges have discretion, so we show the range and flag mandatory minimums separately. We also publish alternative dispositions — diversion and first-offender programs such as Massachusetts’s 24D disposition — because that is what most first-offense readers actually experience, and most competing sites omit them entirely.

Local terminology

We call the offense what the state calls it: OUI in Massachusetts, OWI in Wisconsin and Iowa, DWI in Texas and New York, DUII in Oregon. Using the wrong term is a reliable sign that a page was written from a template rather than from the law.

Verification, and what we refuse to publish

A state goes live only after every row has been checked against the primary statute text. 44 of 50 states are published. The rest are researched but not yet verified, so they are not on the site at all — no stub pages, no hedged summaries. We would rather have a gap than a guess.

That gate has already earned its keep. In one verification pass against statute text we corrected a state’s felony lookback window that was wrong by five years, corrected another state’s offense classifications, and removed a first-offense-felony framing that a later bill had reversed. Any of those would have been badly misleading to someone reading about their own case.

How research is done

Research and drafting are AI-assisted, working from the primary statute documents themselves rather than from other websites, and every published figure is checked against that primary text before it goes live. We think that’s worth stating plainly rather than leaving you to wonder.

Dates and review

Every state page carries a last-reviewed date, and it is the real date the page was checked — not a script that stamps today’s date to look fresh. We re-verify states when we learn of an amendment, and sweep the full set at least annually. If a date looks old to you, treat it accordingly and check the linked statute.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Email support@duilawsbystate.com with the page and what looks off — a citation to the controlling statute helps most. Substantive corrections update the page and its last-reviewed date.

Independence

Advertising has no influence on any of the above. No advertiser can change a number, commission a page, or appear in our editorial content — see our Advertising Disclosures.

What this is not

Accurate general information is still not legal advice. We can tell you what the statute says; we cannot tell you what will happen in your case. For that, talk to an attorney licensed in the state where the charge is pending.