The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) Tips for Navigating This Site

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many.

The navigation column appearing to the left provides a link to every web page of the NCIDP site. A few special links, such as to PDF files and our contact, can only be found within the content of the relevant web pages. For example, a link to contact us can only be found on our "Contact the NCIDP" web page.

We suggest reading the web pages of this site in the same general order in which they are listed in the navigation column on the left side of this and each web page. As the web pages progress further down the list in the navigation column, content will tend to become increasingly complex and technical and will build upon information presented in preceding web pages.

Check back with this website regularly. Content will be added continuously. Our archives are brimming with information that we have yet to begin reviewing for addition to this site - this despite the significant amount of lost research information mentioned on our "About the NCIDP" page.

Don't skip web pages thinking that you know the subject well enough already. Indeed, while we have tried hard to explain the law in the simplest possible terms for easy understanding by average people, the underlying facts of law that we discuss on this website are opaque to even the vast majority of legal professionals and scholars - that is why we are consultants to those legal professionals on this subject. Many a lawyer has flippantly dismissed, off the cuff, the legal facts presented here - facts defying their assumptions - only to experience jaw-dropping astonishment when they actually sit down to the research and validate those facts. We present the legal facts as they are and don't even push the legal envelope. The only aspect of the information that we provide that is at all surprising is that it reveals how far off-base the assumptions of many are.

Please do visit our "Contact the NCIDP" and "Donations" web pages. We like to hear your feedback and your stories, and we are grateful for every donation that we receive.

The legal facts that we provide on this website give you tools to empower you in the care and control of your own identity information. We also hope that you find here the inspiration to do so.

Reading our citations: Proper full case citations often appear to be lengthy exercises in numerology that really impair the readability of the material for average people. It is also only really useful to legal professionals. Consequently, we typically list only short citations to ease the reading. Generally, we show the case name, the court writing the decision, and the year of that decision. For example, the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Boyd v. U.S. case will usually appear in our citations as "Boyd v. U.S. (S Ct., 1886)". Despite years of experience in reading these cases, we still find that form more readable, and we believe it to be more meaningful to the average person, than "Boyd v. U.S. 116 U.S. 616, 617", which more closely resembles how the case would appear in standard legal citation format. We won't here try to explain what all of those numbers mean.

We abbreviate the U.S. Supreme Court to "S Ct.". We abbreviate the King's Bench and Queen's Bench to KB and QB, respectively. Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal usually appear something like "U.S. 9th Cir.". Federal District Courts usually appear something like "U.S. Dist. HI", with the HI referring to Hawaii in this case. If we occasionally cite a state court at some level, it will generally appear with the state name at the beginning of the citation, such as "CA State S Ct." for the California State Supreme Court.