Core room
Qualified Immunity: The Living Documentary
Five doors, five working tabs. A documentary that keeps its sources beside it, admits what it does not know, and publishes its own corrections in public rather than editing them away.
Triple Lens on the DISCUSS room · how this works
Door 01 · Watch
Six chapters, each with its captions and its full text beside it.
No film exists in this build and none is claimed. What exists is the chapter architecture: runtimes as specifications, poster cards drawn in SVG, a caption cue list and a complete written transcript panel for every chapter. Premiere and replay windows appear in the rights gate as things to be cleared — never as a live stream, a schedule, or a promise.
What the WATCH door will and will not do
Will: present chapters and approved recorded author introductions and reflections behind an entitlement check; carry captions on by default; carry a full transcript for every segment; state the record state that dominates each chapter on the chapter card itself.
Will not: imply that a chapter is watchable today, offer a countdown to a premiere, or replay a session beyond a window that a signed agreement permits. Nothing here is a delivered asset.
Chapter list · select to open
Author introductions and reflections would appear as short additional entries in this list, each one individually approved by Tracy Williams and each one carrying its own transcript. None are recorded.
Door 02 · Verify
The dated record, and the four labels that keep it honest.
This is the intellectual centre of the whole project. Every entry below carries exactly one record state. Switch a state off and its entries leave the view, the counts change, and the legend stays pinned so you always know what you are looking at. Court decisions are cited with court and year; holdings are kept short and general on purpose, so that a summary never outruns its source.
Record-state legend & filter — press a label to include or exclude it
Allegation — a claim someone has made, on the record as a claim only. Testimony — a statement given under oath or under this project’s consent protocol. Record — what a document says, cited so you can read it yourself. Editorial conclusion — the author’s argument, dated and attributed, never presented as a finding.
Definitions
Five terms and one procedural note do most of the work in these cases. Expand any of them; the same definitions appear inline in the Clearly Established reader.
How a citation is handled
Every Record entry names the reporter volume and page so it can be pulled independently. Holdings are stated in one general sentence. Where a decision was issued per curiam, the entry says so, because it matters to how lawyers read it.
Nothing in this timeline paraphrases a case beyond its disposition. The project does not restate case facts, and it does not attribute motives to judges or to officers. Where an inference is being drawn, the entry is coloured oxblood and labelled Editorial conclusion.
Two entries in this timeline are marked as sample prototype entries — an interview and a filed complaint — because they demonstrate the Testimony and Allegation surfaces. They are identified as samples in their own source lines rather than being dressed up as real case material.
Provenance lives next door
Each record entry here has, or would have, a matching item in The Fourth Record with custody, reviewer, version and status. The timeline tells you what happened; the register tells you how the project came to hold the document that says so.
Door 03 · Discuss
Moderated Q&A with a named reviewer between the question and the answer.
Questions are collected in advance, not shouted into a live chat. Every question passes through four states, and a named source reviewer must sign off before an answer is published. Sessions carry captions and a full transcript. Nothing is answered on the strength of confidence alone.
The roles, named
Producer — owns the session, sequences questions, and is accountable for what reaches the author. Source reviewer — a separate person who checks every proposed answer against the cited record and can block publication. Author — Tracy Williams, who answers, and who approves film status and language. No single person occupies two of these roles for the same question.
Accessibility in session
Captions are on by default and cannot be traded away for a cleaner frame. A full text transcript is published with the recording, and the transcript is the archival record if the two ever disagree. Quiet Mode in the header carries into session playback, muting ambient beds and softening contrast transitions.
Moderation queue
Submitted → Source-reviewed → Approved → AnsweredIn this prototype you can advance a card by hand to see the workflow. In production, only the producer and the source reviewer can move a card, every move is logged, and a card that reaches Answered publishes the reviewer’s note alongside the answer.
Door 04 · Act
Civic education, screening resources, and a hard line the project will not cross.
The ACT door exists so that people who have watched something difficult have somewhere useful to put the feeling. It is deliberately narrow.
Stated plainly: no partisan targeting, no policy scoring
This project does not endorse candidates or parties, does not target officials or districts, does not publish scorecards, ratings or grades for legislators, courts, agencies or municipalities, and does not coordinate campaigns. It does not tell you who to vote for or against, and it does not rank any jurisdiction against another. Every action offered in this door is reviewed for factual accuracy before it is listed, and any action that cannot survive that review is not listed at all.
Understand the doctrine
A four-part explainer sequence built from the VERIFY timeline: what the statute says, what the defence adds, how the specificity requirement works in practice, and what a court is and is not deciding when it grants immunity. Written for a reader with no legal training, and reviewed by a lawyer before publication.
Reviewed for accuracyHost a lawful screening
A screening pack for libraries, campuses, faith groups and community centres: a licence request route, a facilitator guide with timings, three discussion sequences of increasing difficulty, and a one-page handout of the four record states so a room can argue precisely. Screening rights are an open gate; no screening may be scheduled until they are cleared.
Depends on screening rightsRead the primary sources
A guided route into free public sources: how to find a reported decision from a citation, how to read a docket, what a per curiam opinion is, and how to tell an order from a pleading. The aim is that a viewer leaves able to check this project rather than trust it.
Reviewed for accuracyThe accuracy review, described
Every item in this door goes through the same check as an answer in the DISCUSS door: a source reviewer confirms each factual assertion against a cited document, flags anything that reads as advocacy rather than description, and either returns it for narrowing or clears it. An item that has been cleared shows the date it was cleared. An item that fails does not appear with a warning label — it simply is not published.
Safe participation
Discussion resources are written for moderated settings with an adult facilitator. There is no open messaging surface anywhere in this project, no direct contact between participants, and no public profiles. Where a screening involves young people, the facilitator guide requires adult-controlled entry and collects no participant data at all.
Door 05 · Update
Append-only. The record is never silently rewritten.
A living documentary about a moving doctrine will be wrong sometimes. The commitment is not that this project will never make a mistake — it is that a mistake will be corrected in public, as a new dated entry, with the superseded wording preserved and a content hash on both. Nothing is edited out of existence.
Revision history
What a hash is doing here
Each entry carries a content digest computed from its date, kind and text. If a published entry were ever altered, its digest would no longer match the one already distributed with the entry, and the alteration would be detectable rather than invisible. The digests in this prototype are computed in the browser by a short non-cryptographic function for demonstration; a production build would use a real cryptographic hash and publish the digest chain.
What triggers an update
A new decision that changes the doctrine. A new interview or record entering the register. A reviewer challenge that narrows or withdraws an editorial conclusion. A reclassification between record states — the most common kind, and the one most likely to matter to a reader. A consent withdrawal. And an expiring rights window, which is published as an entry rather than quietly removing a chapter.