Prolonged Detention Stories is a website that humanizes, and makes interactive, a legal brief. It’s a simple and beautiful design, that lays out not only what legal arguments against prolonged detention are, but also puts human faces and scenarios on them.
The group, a partnership of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) and the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the New York University School of Law (IRC), have taken a brief for the US Supreme Court Jennings v. Rodriguez and made it interactive and human. They’ve annotated the legal arguments with additional information about the families whose lives are at stake.
The site uses annotation technology to lay out its legal argument, but then put layers on top of it. Just like Rap Genius annotates rap lyrics, the Genius tool here lays out more details, links, and commentary onto the official legal brief.
