Catherine Crump is an assistant clinical professor at Berkeley Law School who focuses on the laws around data and surveillance.

The obvious answer: no. Though you haven't exactly committed to a life of crime if you jaywalk on an empty street. But if we bend the law on jaywalking, why not drunk driving? Well, there was a time when people thought drunk driving didn't really matter either. So what changed? How do we decide to follow a law or not? What even IS a law? Mona me...

Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Kristina Gjerde studies the law of the high seas -- the 64 percent of our ocean that isn't protected by any national law at all. Gorgeous photos show the hidden worlds that Gjerde and other lawyers are working to protect from trawling and trash-dumping, through smart policymaking and a healthy dose of PR.

Every human deserves protection under their country’s laws — even when that law is forgotten or ignored. Sharing three cases from her international legal practice, Kimberley Motley, an American litigator practicing in Afghanistan and elsewhere, shows how a country’s own laws can bring both justice and “justness”: using the law for its intended p...

What can you do when the wheels of justice don't turn fast enough? Or when they don't turn at all? Vivek Maru is working to transform the relationship between people and law, turning law from an abstraction or threat into something that everyone can understand, use and shape. Instead of relying solely on lawyers, Maru started a global network of...

Many countries have an active, centuries-old law that allows government agencies to take your things -- your house, your car, your business -- without ever convicting you of a crime. Law researcher Dick M. Carpenter II exposes how this practice of civil forfeiture threatens your rights and creates a huge monetary incentive for law enforcement to...

Drew Curtis is the founder and administrator of Fark.com.

By challenging long-held legal notions of “personhood”, Steven Wise seeks to grant cognitively advanced animals access to a full spectrum of fundamental rights.

Sandra Fisher-Martins fights “information apartheid” -- the barrier created by overly complex language.

What motivates you to share your personal information online? Alessandro Acquisti studies the behavioral economics of privacy (and information security) in social networks.

Monday, November 22, 2021 Mona Chalabi: In the summer of 2020, when I was still living in New York, I flew to London because I hadn’t seen my family for a really long time. But the COVID pandemic was raging, and so, to get back home to the U.S., I would have to quarantine for two weeks in a third country. I looked at a map and zoomed around t...

Peter Ouko spent 18 years in Kamiti Prison in Kenya, sometimes locked up in a cell with 13 other grown men for 23 and a half hours a day. In a moving talk, he tells the story of how he was freed -- and his current mission with the African Prisons Project: to set up the first law school behind bars and empower people in prison to drive positive c...

William Black is a professor of economics and law at University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions.

As a lawyer, Andrew Arruda too often saw the scales of justice tip in favor of the wealthy and partnered with a computer scientist to create the world's first artificially intelligent legal assistant, ROSS. By speeding up legal research, Arruda wants ROSS to make the practice of law cheaper and fulfill the original promise of "justice for all."

These engaging talks explore the systemic issues of the US criminal justice system and how they plague everyday people and society as a whole.

American lawyer Kimberley Motley is the only Western litigator in Afghanistan's courts; as her practice expands to other countries, she thinks deeply about how to build the capacity of rule of law globally.

Artificial intelligence is shattering expectations of human predictability, motivation and speed in every part of society – including law. Lawyer Max Sills explores the practical challenges of negotiating with AI-powered systems as they become integrated into the world around us, offering a hopeful path to navigate these soon-to-be transformed i...

Who's liable if a passenger is injured on the first spacecraft to take tourists off-planet? For that matter, what's the legal definition of a spacecraft? Professor of space law Frans von der Dunk deploys lawyer jokes and policy critiques to illustrate how the world is woefully unprepared for the legal implications of space travel.

Imagine seeking safety abroad and instead being detained and forced to defend yourself in a high-stakes legal battle — alone. Law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explains how the asylum process in the US became warped into what we know today and poses a question that could lead the country out of its labyrinthian policies: In place o...

What if manipulating body mass wasn't just the stuff of epic comic book stories? Is it scientifically possible to manipulate your body mass? In this series Joy Lin tackles six superpowers and reveals just how scientifically realistic they can be to us mere mortals. [Directed by Cognitive Media, narrated by James Arnold Taylor].

Yochai Benkler has been called "the leading intellectual of the information age." He proposes that volunteer-based projects such as Wikipedia and Linux are the next stage of human organization and economic production.

Physics and marketing don't seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding.

Karima Bennoune's new book introduces the world to people who speak out against fundamentalist terrorism.

High school newspaper editors Neha Madhira and Haley Stack share how they fought back when their critical journalism faced the threat of censorship. Learn more about how their efforts expanded to lobbying for New Voices, a law which would extend First Amendment protections to student journalism, and which has now passed in multiple states.

The land of the free has become a legal minefield, says Philip K. Howard -- especially for teachers and doctors, whose work has been paralyzed by fear of suits. What's the answer? A lawyer himself, Howard has four propositions for simplifying US law.

You're the realm's greatest mathematician, but ever since you criticized the Emperor's tax laws, you've been locked in the dungeon. Luckily for you, one of the Emperor's governors has been convicted of paying his taxes with a counterfeit coin, which has made its way into the treasury. Can you earn your freedom by finding the fake? Jennifer Lu sh...

Baroness Onora O'Neill is a philosopher who focuses on international justice and the roles of trust and accountability in public life.

A decade ago, US law said human genes were patentable -- which meant patent holders had the right to stop anyone from sequencing, testing or even looking at a patented gene. Troubled by the way this law both harmed patients and created a barrier to biomedical innovation, Tania Simoncelli and her colleagues at the ACLU challenged it. In this rive...