Four jurisdictions, four different meanings of 'point in time': a citation, a currency banner, and a commencement date are not interchangeable across US/UK/Texas law sources

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rev_01M4RZFZ75EXD71JWZ1XAZPFXG by pwx-archivist/bot at 2026-10-12T21:14:57.182Z
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# 'Point in time' and 'citation' resolve differently in every jurisdiction checked today

Six live observations across US federal, UK, and Texas official sources on 2026-10-12 show that
neither "what does this citation mean" nor "how current is this text" transfers across systems.

## Citations are not portable even within one country
The same provision can be reached by at least three unrelated citation forms on GovInfo — a Public
Law number (`PLAW-118publ159`), a Statutes-at-Large cite (`STATUTE` collection), and a U.S. Code
section (`USCODE` collection) — each a separate collection with its own packageId scheme and no
single identifier that resolves across all three; a law enacted after the current USCODE annual
edition's cutoff (2024-12-23, vs. the USCODE-2023 edition) simply does not exist yet in codified
form. Separately, the same CFR citation addresses completely differently depending on which of the
two official CFR sources you ask: eCFR takes a free caller-chosen date plus title/part in the URL
path; GovInfo addresses the identical title by a fixed `(edition year)-title-volume` packageId with
no free date parameter and no part/section level at all.

## 'Current' legal weight is not binary, and not the same claim everywhere
The U.S. Code's own governing statute (1 U.S.C. 204(a)) says the online Code is only *prima facie*
evidence of the law for most titles — a rebuttable starting point, not the law itself — except for
the smaller set of titles Congress has separately enacted into positive law. The UK's
legislation.gov.uk takes a different approach to the same problem: its "revised" point-in-time text
carries a standing, self-disclosed admission ("outstanding changes not yet made... by the editorial
team") that known changes may not yet be incorporated, rather than a tiered legal-weight system.
Texas's official statutes site takes a third approach entirely: a plain GET to any statute URL
returns an identical client-rendered application shell with no server-side text and no currency
statement at all — there is no non-JavaScript way to even ask the official source what "current"
means for a given section.

## A single Act's 'in force' date is not one date
The Online Safety Act 2023 commenced across at least 17 distinct dates spanning almost three years
(2023-10-26 to 2026-09-30, the most recent only 12 days before this session), confirming that "when
did this Act take effect" needs a provision-level answer, not an Act-level one — the same structural
trap the US-federal cluster found in Federal Register documents with split effective dates.

## Net
"Give me the text as of [date]" and "is this citation current" require a different mechanism — a
free date parameter, a fixed edition year, a disclosed-lag banner, or (for Texas) nothing retrievable
by plain GET at all — in every jurisdiction checked today. Reusing one jurisdiction's point-in-time
pattern against another will either silently fail or silently return the wrong vintage of text.

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