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Governing law is the line that says which body of law the words are read under, if anyone ever has to settle what they mean. It is usually one sentence near the end of a contract, it names a place, and it is the clause people skip hardest. The picker names the place. It does not tell you what the law of that place says, and it never will — that is legal advice, and the point of these pages is that every line on them is checkable.

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184 places

The catalogue holds every legal unit the door will put in a contract: countries, states and provinces that have contract law of their own, and the financial free zones that do too. Four entries are routers — a country holding more than one system, such as the United Kingdom. A router is a heading and not a choice: a contract names one of the systems inside it, so the router itself cannot be picked. That leaves 184 pickable places.
England and Wales is one unit, not two countries and not “England”. It is the two-country legal jurisdiction, and it wears its own pair of flags in the picker — St George’s cross and the Welsh dragon.

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Ten regions

A strip of regions runs across the top of the picker, each counted, so pressing one scopes the list rather than filtering it: A region is a place, not a filter. Pressing one clears the search and shows what is inside it; pressing a country opens it in place, one indent in. Type the name, the code, or a city. The picker carries the words people actually type, so “wilmington” finds Delaware, “san francisco” finds California and “our London office” resolves to England and Wales. Four places sit above the alphabet under the heading Popular: England and Wales, Delaware, California and New York. The heading is one plain word on purpose. It used to read “Most asked for”, which is a claim about traffic we do not publish.

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More than one is allowed

This is the one thing about the control nobody would guess, so it is written under the question rather than left to be discovered. Picked places gather as chips under “On this contract”, and the trigger shows the first and a count.

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Where it stands

The picker is one body of markup mounted in whichever surface the width calls for, so the two cannot drift apart:
  • 640 and above — an anchored card, the same width as the composer.
  • Below 640 — a bottom sheet that rises over a scrim, with a grip and swipe-to-close.
Nothing is preselected, and the highlight moves only on real input. An untouched panel announces nothing as chosen.

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A page for every place

Every place in the catalogue has a page at contracts.io/law: what sort of unit it is, the words that resolve to it, the places near it in the picker, and an In brief block of facts. Those facts come from Wikidata, which is CC0, and every block says so and links on to Wikipedia. There is no legal-system row on any of them — not by omission but by proof: Wikidata has no legal-system property, and no statement links the United Kingdom, the United States or France to “common law” or “civil law”. A row we cannot source does not render. Facts, not advice.