For the first time in decades, the future of abortion rights in the US is uncertain. With the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, The Supreme Court has forced Americans to reconsider and fight for a new vision of a right to abortion should be.But it’s important to remember that debates about abortion don’t end at our borders. The end of Roe will have global ramifications for how other countries think about abortion rights but, as the US re-enters this international debate, are their lessons we can learn from how other countries have constituted, or failed to constitute, a right to abortion?

In a world with personalized laws, each person would be subject to different legal rules and their own personally-tailored laws. For example, if you're a good driver, you could be rewarded for that good behavior with less stringent laws. Through this idea, and the acceleration of AI, technology could be used to comprehend our data from various places to create laws individual to us. These are some of the ideas that Omri Ben-Shahar writes about in his book, Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People.In this episode, we speak to Omri Ben-Shahar about the questions and concerns that personalized law presents, and how it could be used in the future. Ben-Shahar is professor of law at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics. 

More than half a million people are currently homeless in the United States. It's a crisis that extends beyond California and is trending upwards in other states, too. Most jurisdictions in the US have no right to shelter, and the right to have a home at all is not a guarantee. But just across the border, Canada recognizes the right to adequate housing as a fundamental human right affirmed in international law. In this episode, we speak with Canadian lawyer Leilani Farha, the former Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, about how we ended up with a homelessness crisis and what remedies should look like. Leilani is also Global Director of The Shift, a housing initiative.

Animals suffer at the hands of humans every day. Not just in factory farms, but also in our homes, where pets don’t receive enough attention or exercise, and in our oceans, where humans disrupt their habitats and ecosystems. To what extent should animals have rights? In this special episode, we speak to world-leading philosopher Martha Nussbaum, professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and author of Justice for Animals. Nussbaum expands her theory into why politics and law should redirect our ethical responsibilities towards animals.

Artificial intelligence is all around us—it listens to us, even watches us, and waits for our daily demands. From Alexa to Siri, to Sophia, the social humanoid robot, AIs want to be our companions (at least, the companies who build them want us to think so). However, some people fear that the more sentient AIs become, the more they will have to be treated with basic rights. Do AIs deserve rights? And if they do, what would those rights entail? In this episode, Tom and Claudia imagine a not-so-distant future where AIs have rights, what those rights could look like, and whether or not this would play out like a dystopian sci-fi novel. They get a myriad of perspectives from Andrew Stout, a robot software engineer; Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago; Aziz Huq, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago; and Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed A.I. Research Institute.