A citizen's index of the law — built the way a citizen would actually use it.
Marginalia today is six federal codebooks indexed together: the Constitution, the U.S. Code, the CFR, the UCC, the Treasury Financial Manual, and the Internal Revenue Manual. That's the floor, not the ceiling. What follows is the full vision — what's shipped, what's being built right now, and the bigger swings on the horizon. Some of it is live. Most of it isn't yet. All of it is on the table.
Federal floor: six books, one search.
Every word of the federal codebooks is indexed, cross-linked, and searchable from a single bar. No paraphrase, no AI summary swapped in for the source. You read the law itself, with one click back to the official text it came from.
Compare Mode puts the same term in split panes across multiple books at once. That alone replaces the usual loop of: search, open tab, ctrl-F, give up, ask Reddit.
All 50 states, same shelf.
Federal law is the floor. State statutes and administrative codes are where most people actually get tangled — landlord-tenant, traffic, family, small claims, tax. Each state's code becomes another book on the same shelf, with the same search, same compare, same annotation tools.
Pinned to your account: pick the states you actually live and work in, and they get top billing in every search.
Specialized lanes for the real questions.
Most people don't search "the law." They search a situation: an eviction notice, a wage-theft complaint, a denied tax refund, a debt collector who won't stop calling. Domain packs bundle the relevant federal statutes, regulations, agency guidance, and state equivalents into a single curated reading list — with the citations pre-threaded.
Planned packs: tenant rights, consumer credit & debt, wage and hour, traffic & criminal procedure, small business formation, tax controversy, family court basics. More based on what people actually open.
The citation graph, made visible.
A statute rarely stands alone. It gets defined in one place, modified in another, enforced by an agency rule somewhere else, and overridden by a court case nobody links to. The graph view makes those threads visible — click any section and see what cites it, what it cites, and what cites the things it cites.
Alerts that actually mean something.
Set a keyword, a section, or a topic. Get pinged when the underlying text changes, when new agency guidance lands, or when a freshly indexed document mentions it. No more checking the Federal Register on a Tuesday hoping you didn't miss something.
Cases, notes, and exports.
Save citations into private Case folders. Highlight and annotate sections in your own words. Export a clean PDF that includes the source text and your notes side by side — ready to walk into a courtroom, a hearing, or just a phone call with someone who insists you're wrong.
A structured legal corpus, not another scraper.
Behind the search bar is a normalized, de-duplicated, version-tracked corpus of every source on the shelf. Same schema across federal, state, and agency text. That's not a UI feature — it's the thing that makes everything else possible, and the thing that gives the data genuine value beyond the app itself.
Optional AI, with the source always on screen.
When AI shows up here, it shows up as a research assistant, not an oracle. Every answer comes attached to the actual statute or regulation it's reading from, and you can see the source text without leaving the page. If the model can't ground its answer in something on the shelf, it doesn't get to answer.
Things that don't exist yet — but should.
None of what follows is shipped. Some of it is queued, some is sketched on the back of a napkin, some is still an argument we're having with ourselves. We're putting it on the page because the point of Marginalia is to be the thing it's pointing at — and the only honest way to build that is in public.
Caselaw, threaded into the statutes
Every section of the U.S. Code annotated with the federal cases that have actually interpreted it. Click a paragraph, see how courts read it — circuit splits and all.
Form library with smart fill
Court forms, agency complaints, FOIA letters, fee waivers — pre-wired to the statute that authorizes them. Fill once, file anywhere it applies.
Plain-English layer (toggleable)
A second pane that translates legalese into normal sentences, side by side with the original. The original never moves. The translation is always labeled as a translation.
Procedural maps for every domain
"Here's the eviction process in your state, step by step, with the statute behind each step and the deadline next to it." A map, not a wall of text.
Deadline calculator
Drop in a court date, a notice date, an agency response — get back every statutory deadline that hangs off it, with citations. Adds to your calendar.
Local rules + court-specific procedure
Federal district rules, state trial court rules, even individual judges' standing orders. The stuff that gets cases dismissed and nobody warns you about.
Public Cases (opt-in)
Make a Case folder public. Other people facing the same situation see your reading list, your annotations, your filings — fully attributed, fully optional.
Rights-at-a-glance cards
Pulled-over, knock-and-talk, ICE at the door, school search, traffic stop. One card per situation, every claim backed to a statute or a controlling case.
Read-aloud + audio briefs
Long agency manuals turned into clean audio you can listen to on the bus. Same source text, just a different way in.
Historical versions, side by side
Pick a date, see the law as it stood that day. Compare two versions of the same section with a single click. Useful for cases, essential for journalism.
Pro se starter courses
Short, free, branching courses that walk you from "I just got served" to "I filed a response." Built around the actual statutes, not generic advice.
Federal Register, demystified
The daily firehose of new rules, sliced by agency and topic, with diffs against the existing CFR. Subscribe to a slice, get a weekly digest.
None of these are promises. They're the shape of the thing we're trying to build. If one of them sounds like the reason you'd actually use Marginalia, tell us — that's how the next quarter gets prioritized.
Roughly when, roughly in what order.
Dates are honest estimates, not commitments. Things move when the corpus, the funding, and reality all line up.
- nowShipped
Federal six on one shelf
Constitution, USC, CFR, UCC, TFM, IRM — searchable, cross-linked, and free to read.
- this quarterIn build
Cases, notes & exports v1
Save citations into private Case folders, annotate sections, export clean PDFs that hold up at a hearing.
- next quarterComing soon
First five state codes
California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois — same schema, same search, pinned to your account.
- next quarterComing soon
Domain packs (tenant, debt, wage)
The first three curated reading lists, with procedural maps and deadline calculators wired in.
- later this yearComing soon
Citation graph + alerts
Visual graph view across the corpus. Subscribe to a section or a keyword, get pinged when it changes.
- later this yearOn the horizon
Caselaw threading
Federal opinions threaded into the statutes they interpret. Starts with the most-cited sections and works outward.
- next yearOn the horizon
All 50 states, plain-English layer, AI assistant
The shelf gets full, the translation pane goes live, and the source-grounded research assistant opens for Pro accounts.
How we'd rather lose than win.
Reading the law stays free.
Forever. The source is public; the index of it should be too. Pro pays for the desk around it.
The source is always on screen.
No summary replaces the statute. Translations and AI answers ride alongside the original — they don't replace it.
No legal advice, ever.
We index the law. We don't tell you what to do with it. That line is the whole reason this can exist.
Open exports, always.
Your Cases, notes, and citations leave with you in plain formats. No lock-in is part of the product.
why $5
Five bucks a month is the honest number.
Reading the law stays free. Pro covers the work that scales: ingesting state codes, keeping agency manuals current, the citation graph, alerts, exports, the whole research desk. Every $5 funds another piece. No trial, no bait, no upsell ladder.