Know The Law

Know The Law Homepage
Know The Law Problem

Inspiration

Know the Law was inspired by recent problems with ICE agents targeting many minorities and falsely arresting these citizens. This project seeks to inform those in the Valley about their rights and teach people how to act in front of law enforcement while knowing your rights. This project is meant to not only inform those in the RGV, but also protect them from corruption.

What it does

When a user opens the site, they land on a welcome screen presenting four constitutional amendments as clickable cards. The amendments that were chosen for this project were the 4th, 5th, 6th and the 8th Amendments.

When the user selects one of the options, users are given a decision tree which asks the user a question and asks that users pick an option that best matches their situation. After selecting an option, this tree either branches into a follow up question or users are given a conclusion panel. Each conclusion panel has three main features:

A simple explanation of what the law actually protects you from
A list of rights that users can use based on their scenario
A "What to Say" block which shows the exact words that users should be using

These panels are also color coded based on how important they are. Green panel is used for information that users should know in a situation that is pretty straightforward. An example of this, is when police have a valid warrant and you need to know what to do next. Yellow is used to notify users to be cautious and that they need to carefully learn about the scenario that they are in. For example, police claiming an emergency to enter your home without a warrant. Lastly, Red is used for critical situations where users need to immediately act on their rights. An example of this can be seen when police don't have a warrant or emergency and are still trying to enter your home or when you invoke your right to an attorney.

The application also has a bilingual feature that switches everything to Spanish. This is extremely important in the RGV, which has a large quantity of people who primarily speak Spanish and who might not understand English.

Other features include a home button and a back button for users to return to previous parts of the program in case they made a mistake.

How we built it

This app is a pure static web application which it means it runs entirely from three main files, index.html, app.js, and style.css. This was built on purpose as the app only requires internet connection for it to be downloaded once before being usable. This was done due to the harsh reality the RGV, where rural areas might not have great coverage to run a complex system with poor cellular coverage. Through our project users can save the entire app on their phone and access it anywhere.

Bilingual support is also layered on top without touching the tree logic. This means that all the Spanish translations are stored right next to the English text inside the same file. This means that when a user taps the language toggle, the app swaps out the words on the screen with nothing else changing. This was useful because if there were ever any translation issues, the only thing that would need to be updated is the text and you wouldn't need to rewire any part of how the app works. We used the assistance of claude ai to help us build this project alongside with us.

Challenges we ran into

Since our team is all beginners, a big portion of the beginning of this hackathon was dedicated to learning how to navigate GitHub and the terminal. In terms of coding, a big problem was ensuring the rights were accurate because wrong information could be detrimental.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An accomplishment we are proud of is having a fully functional bilingual decision tree that covers four fundamental amendments. We are very proud of the fact that the app can be used for both Spanish and English It is also a UI that scales from a laptop to a phone screen without a framework.

What we learned

We learned how to use different languages together and how to work as a team in GitHub. This was also all of our first projects, so the whole process in general taught us more than we can describe.

What's next for Know The Law

Next for Know The Law is expanding the amendment coverage with more amendments. Also being able to get a community review to see any other ideas we could add would be great.