Research methodology

LEX ZED works from Zambian primary legal material. Judgments come from the Judiciary of Zambia and ZambiaLII. Acts of Parliament and subsidiary legislation come from the National Assembly of Zambia, with ZambiaLII used as a secondary index where the official source is unavailable.

• Judiciary of Zambia — judgments of the superior courts
• ZambiaLII — judgments and consolidated legislation
• National Assembly of Zambia — Acts and Bills

A judgment is only added to the library when the case name, citation, court, date of judgment and coram can be read from the authoritative record. We do not create case entries from a summary, a news report or an AI output, and we do not reconstruct the text of a judgment.

Where an official document exists, the case page links to it. Where a judgment is available to us only as verified text and no official document is published, the page says so plainly instead of presenting an unverified file as authoritative.

Legislation entries record the short title, the Act or instrument number and the year, taken from the official record. The library is an index and a reading aid; the authoritative text is the one published by the National Assembly, and every legislation page points the reader there.

Currency is the part of legal research most often skipped, so we treat it explicitly. Where we know that a provision has been amended, replaced by a consolidating Act, or repealed, the entry reflects it, and material identified as repealed is filtered out of imports.

We do not claim to hold a real-time consolidated statute book. Before relying on any provision, check its current status against the National Assembly record. Our tools are built to make that check quick, not to remove it.

The LEX ZED assistant is instructed to answer from the legislation and judgments available to it, to name the provision or authority that supports each proposition, and to say when it cannot find authority rather than producing plausible-sounding filler. It does not invent case names, citations, section numbers or quotations, and it does not reconstruct the wording of a judgment.

Where an answer draws on material outside the internal library, the search is limited to the approved Zambian sources listed above. Every AI answer carries a warning to open and read the authority before relying on it, because verification remains the user's responsibility.

Everything published on the public pages of LEX ZED — including the Legal Knowledge Hub — is general legal information. Legal advice is the application of the law to your specific facts by a practitioner who is accountable for it. Our material is not that, and no AI output on this platform is that. See the editorial policy and the legal disclaimer.