Fifty states, fifty criminal codes, fifty different answers to the same question. No federal Romeo and Juliet law exists, so there is nothing sitting above them to make the answers agree.
Search for the rule in any one of those states and you will mostly find law firm pages that describe the question without answering it. The law is complex. Every case turns on its facts. Call now for a free consultation. All three statements are true, and none of them helps at eleven at night when somebody needs to know what a four-year age gap means in Ohio.
This site answers the question, shows the section of the code the answer came from, and prints the date somebody last read that section.
What a state guide here contains
Four questions, in the same order, for every state:
- The age of consent. The number, the section it lives in, and whether the state uses a single threshold or several graded by the defendant’s age.
- The close-in-age allowance. The permitted gap exactly as the statute words it, in years or in months, together with the floor age below which it stops applying at all.
- Exemption or affirmative defence. Whether the provision removes the offence or hands you something you have to win with in court.
- Registration. What the state’s registration act says, which tier applies, how long it runs, and whether there is a petition to come off it.
Same four, same sequence, whether or not a particular state has anything interesting to say about each one. A state with no close-in-age provision still gets the heading, with the answer written flat underneath.
That consistency is the reason the site exists in this shape. Two states can be held side by side and compared. Try that with ten law firm blog posts written in ten different orders and you will give up halfway.
The distinction that decides most of these cases
Take two states with identical numbers. Age of consent 17. A three-year close-in-age allowance. A 19-year-old and a 16-year-old.
In the first state, the age gap sits inside the definition of the offence. Three years falls within the allowance, so the conduct never meets the definition. There is nothing to charge.
In the second state, the same three years appears in a subsection that opens with the words it is a defense to prosecution that. The conduct does meet the definition. A charge can be filed, an arrest can happen, and the defence has to be raised and established at trial by the person accused.
Same ages. Same gap. One is not a crime. The other is a trial.
Almost nothing written about Romeo and Juliet laws online draws that line, and it changes the answer more than any other single fact. It is the third thing every guide here tells you, and the reason statutory wording gets quoted rather than paraphrased.
Every number is tied to a section you can open yourself
Guides here are written from the code. Not from other people’s summaries of the code.
That sounds like a low bar. It is not. A large share of what circulates about these laws traces back to a small number of pages written years ago and copied since, which is how a repealed section number stays alive for a decade. Each copy looks like independent confirmation. None of them went back to the statute.
So the rule here is plain. If a number appears on this site, the section it came from appears beside it, linked to the state legislature’s own website. Open it in a second tab and read the sentence. You do not have to take anything here on trust, and you should not have to.
Where an appellate court has narrowed a provision, the decision is named. Where the code text displayed on a state’s website has not caught up with an amendment passed in the last session, the guide says which amendment and links the session law.
What you can hold this site to
- A linked statutory citation next to every stated rule.
- A review date at the top of every guide, meaning the day the code was last opened and read.
- Registration researched as its own question, from the registration act, never inferred from the offence.
- Corrections published on a dated log rather than absorbed into a silent edit.
- No payment accepted from any law firm, for any placement or mention, at any price.
If a page here ever carries a number with no citation, or no date, that page has failed its own standard. Say so and it gets fixed.
Where a guide stops and a lawyer starts
These guides describe what a statute says. They do not tell you how it applies to a particular situation, and no written guide can.
Two things sit outside the reach of any article. The first is fact-specific judgment: which date controls, whether a particular relationship meets that state’s definition of a position of authority, how an image offence interacts with a close-in-age provision. The second is local practice, meaning what a specific county actually charges and how that court handles these cases in real life.
For both of those you want a criminal defence attorney licensed in that state. This site is built to make that conversation shorter and sharper. Walk in already knowing the difference between an exemption and a defence, and knowing that registration is decided by separate law, and the hour you pay for goes a great deal further.
How this site pays for itself
Advertising. The site is free to read, there is no paywall, no subscription, and nothing is held back for members.
Ads cover hosting, the research subscriptions needed to read statutes and case law properly, and the hours it takes to work through fifty separate criminal codes and their registration acts. That is the entire model, stated plainly so nobody has to guess at it.
What it does not include: no law firm pays to appear here, no guide is sponsored, and no advertiser sees a page before publication or can have one changed afterwards. An ad network fills the slot automatically while the page loads. The advertiser has no idea what it landed beside, and we have no idea who won the auction.
Ads also stay out of the middle of an answer. On a page explaining what a statute permits, an advertisement wedged between the question and the answer is bad reading and worse faith.
When something here is wrong
It gets published. The dated log carries the page, what the error was, and what it says now.
Most sites in this area edit quietly and move on, which is undetectable from the outside and lets a site keep looking right long after it stopped being reliable. Keeping the record costs something. That is exactly what makes it worth reading.
If you find an error, send three things through the contact form: the page, the sentence, and the code section that contradicts it. Corrections that arrive with a citation attached are handled within 48 hours.