Future Law: Law and Governance under transformative societal trends

This course will examine the challenges posed to legal arrangements and institutions of government by certain societal trends – principally related to technological advance and environmental stress – that are likely to have broad and disruptive societal impacts over the professional lifetimes of today’s law students.  Examples of topics we will consider include technological enhancement of human capabilities, human lifespan extension, development of human-comparable intelligence and consciousness in non-human substrates (mainly machines), severe environmental change (considering both controlling the human inputs driving it and adapting to the resultant changes), and active engineered control of the global environment.