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

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is torture ever justified? Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth? How much is one human life worth? In the "Justice" program that bears his name, Harvard professor Michael Sandel probes these questions -- and asks what you think, and why.

Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to differ. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Managing your money can feel scary and complicated -- but it doesn't have to be. In this new TED series, behavioral scientist Wendy De La Rosa explains why we spend too much and save too little and shares easy steps to help us achieve a more secure financial future. (Made possible with the support of Wells Fargo)

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.

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...

Noah Feldman studies the intersection of religion, politics and law.

Blind almost since birth, Ron McCallum is one of Australia's most respected legal scholars, and an activist on behalf of disabled people around the globe.