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LawPod

LawPod

By: Queen's University - School of Law
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LawPod is a weekly podcast based in the Law School at Queen’s University Belfast. We provide a platform to explore law and legal research in an engaging and scholarly way.Queen's University - School of Law Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Humanitarian Forensics and the Disappeared: Oran Finegan on Dignity, Trust, and Accountability

    Humanitarian Forensics and the Disappeared: Oran Finegan on Dignity, Trust, and Accountability
    Jun 25 2026
    LawPod host Dr Lauren Dempster speaks with Oran Finegan, director of Forensic Action International, about his 25+ years as a forensic specialist in humanitarian and human rights work across 50+ global contexts with agencies including the United Nations (UN), The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Finnegan describes beginning in Bosnia in 1998, where documenting mass atrocities underscored both the worst of humanity and the drive to return identities to the dead and support accountability. He emphasises building domestic forensic capacity, culturally and religiously sensitive practice, and trust-building through communication with families and communities, including collaboration with Islamic law scholars on field concerns like autopsy. The discussion covers applications beyond conflict, migration and climate disasters, along with risks, underfunding, and political will. Finegan outlines humanitarian forensics as integrating dignity, system strengthening, and accountability, and shares his current work on planned recovery and analysis at Tuam in Ireland following findings linked to 796 deaths and commingled infant remains.
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    33 mins
  • From Copyright Infringement to Superintelligence: The Legal and Philosophical Future of AI

    From Copyright Infringement to Superintelligence: The Legal and Philosophical Future of AI
    May 20 2026
    What happens when the law meets a general-purpose cultural machine? In this episode, hosts Matteo Iuorio and Sofia Debernardi sit down with intellectual property expert Professor Giancarlo Frosio to unpack the massive legal battleground surrounding generative AI. We start with the immediate legal technicalities—separating the liability of tech companies training models from the liability of users prompting them—before sliding into the gripping, high-stakes philosophical landscape of what happens to human labor, law, and purpose as we race toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence. Key Takeaways
    • The Two Legal Battlegrounds:Copyright issues with AI are split into two distinct phases: theTraining Stage(ingesting data to extract patterns) and theOutput Stage(whether an AI-generated result is "substantially similar" to a protected work).
    • Strict Liability & The Neutral Tool Dilemma:Copyright is a strict liability offense. Professor Frosio shares his perspective that AI labs are placing "neutral, general-purpose tools" on the market. Therefore, legal liability for an infringing output should ideally sit with the user prompting it—provided the developer implemented standard safeguards.
    • The Geopolitical AI Arms Race:Stricter text and data-mining copyright regulations in regions like Europe can function as a bottleneck for local tech development, inadvertently pushing the dominance of the AI "arms race" exclusively toward the US and China.
    • The Looming Threat to Purpose:As the operational capabilities of AI shift from narrow tasks to holistic human replication (AGI) and beyond (superintelligence), society faces a massive conundrum: if artificial entities can outperform human intellectual labor completely, what is left for humanity's sense of purpose?

    Terminology Glossary LLM (Large Language Model): Note: Mentioned contextually as "LMS" during the interview recording. These are AI programs trained on vast amounts of text data to understand, summarize, generate, and predict new content. Substantial Similarity: A fundamental legal doctrine used by courts to determine if an unauthorized reproduction has taken too much protectable expression from an original copyrighted work. AGI vs. Superintelligence: Narrow AI handles specific single tasks. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can holistically apply knowledge to any task like a human. Superintelligence refers to a theoretical future entity whose collective intellect far surpasses the capacity of the human brain. References & Links to Explore
    • Learn more about Professor Frosio's work and research at theGlobal Intellectual Property and Technology Centre (GIP Tech).
    • Check out the landmark pending litigation referenced in the episode:Getty Images v. Stability AIin the UK.
    • Learn about the European Union's framework discussed by reading the official documentation on theEU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act).
    • To explore the philosophical warnings mentioned by the "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton on AGI and systemic alignment risks, check out hisNobel Prize lecturesand recent AI safety advocacy.
    • Read up on the historic sci-fi themes referenced at the end of the episode via Isaac Asimov’s classicFoundation Series.
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    50 mins
  • Punishment, Politics, and Legal Plunder: Joshua Page on the Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice

    Punishment, Politics, and Legal Plunder: Joshua Page on the Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice
    May 14 2026

    In this episode of LawPod, Dr Alessandro Corda is joined by Professor Joshua Page (University of Minnesota) for an in‑depth conversation tracing his intellectual journey through the sociology of punishment and the politics of criminal justice in the United States.

    The discussion is structured around Page’s three major books: The Toughest Beat, which examines the political power of prison officer unions in California; Breaking the Pendulum, which challenges simple narratives of cyclical change in criminal justice policy; and his most recent work, Legal Plunder, co‑authored with Joe Soss, which explores the predatory extraction of resources through the modern criminal justice system.

    Across the episode, they explore how penal policy develops over time, the role of organised interests and policy feedback, the limits of reform, and the ongoing struggles that shape punishment at federal, state, and local levels. The conversation also turns to contemporary debates over bail reform, fiscal pressures on local government, and the broader political economy of criminal justice.

    In the final part of the episode, Professor Page reflects on living in Minneapolis since the murder of George Floyd, discussing how community mobilisation, public trust, and resistance to state power continue to shape the city’s political and social landscape.
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    37 mins
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