Read beyond an article
Product promise
Use an entry as orientation, then inspect the case records, original documents, and research that give particular statements their meaning. Keep each source’s author, procedural status and limits attached to what it says.
An entry is the beginning of a reading journey
Consider Theranos. A short account of the company can introduce its technology and investor representations. It cannot, by itself, replace the different legal instruments describing those representations. The SEC’s March 2018 announcement, the civil complaint, and the Justice Department’s account of Elizabeth Holmes’s jury verdict each answer a different question.
Read the record in layers
- Open a relevant subject or entry and identify the exact issue you are interested in: for example, what Theranos represented to its investors.
- Look at an attributed claim or passage in that entry. Do not mistake an article’s summary for the source’s exact wording.
- Follow the SEC announcement and distinguish the agency’s allegations from the stated civil settlement terms. The announcement explicitly records that Holmes and Theranos neither admitted nor denied the allegations.
- Read the DOJ verdict account for the particular investor-fraud counts the jury decided. That verdict does not adjudicate every sentence of the earlier civil complaint.
- Return to the entry and see how a research document, a case chronology, or another source changes the question you can now ask. Preserve the original author’s attribution and the difference between allegation, disposition, and interpretation.
Expected result: you can explain which document recorded a claim and which legal act resolved a particular charge, without turning every official document into the same kind of proof.
Different records contribute different things
| Material | Best use | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Entry or profile | Understand the subject and locate questions | A readable overview is not itself an adjudication |
| Civil complaint | Read allegations and the government’s pleaded theory | Allegations are not findings merely because filed |
| Settlement | Determine how specified claims were resolved | A no-admit/no-deny settlement does not admit each allegation |
| Criminal verdict | See the counts the jury found proved | Different counts, defendants, or proceedings remain distinct |
| Research document | Read a sourced synthesis and open questions | Its published analysis does not automatically gain judicial or governed standing |
An additional, narrower source is the FDA’s 510(k) record K143236. It names the Theranos Herpes Simplex Virus-1 IgG Assay and records a July 2, 2015 substantial-equivalence decision for that particular device. It does not establish blanket approval of Theranos or prove the performance of every blood test the company advertised. Use it to answer the device-specific regulatory question, not to overwrite the scope of the SEC or DOJ records.
A useful endpoint can be a citation, a qualified comparison, or a more precise unresolved question. You do not need every subject to have a controversy or every article to have a case.
Continue with the document that matters
Start with Reading an entry, examine an investigation through Cases and investigations, or follow a specific passage through Tracing information back to its source.
Related manual chapters
- Reading an entry — begin the reading journey.
- Cases and investigations — follow a case and its positions.
- Research library — explore related documentary work.