LawPod

By Queen's University - School of LawSociety & Culture Education Government

LawPod episodes

November 05 Journeys to Law, with Alberto Gonzales and Deborah R. Farringer
Host Leah Murdy interviews Belmont University College of Law Emeritus Dean Alberto Gonzales and Dean Deborah R. Farringer about their paths into law, key career moments, and guidance for future lawyers. Inger describes working as a paralegal in Seattle, attending Vanderbilt, clerking on the Fourth Circuit, practising healthcare regulatory and in-house corporate health law, and joining Belmont in 2013.
Gonzales recounts military service, Rice and Harvard, 13 years in private practice, state and federal government service, working in the White House during 9/11, and serving as U.S. Attorney General before becoming Belmont's dean.
They emphasise public service, people skills, client-centred seriousness, calm decision-making, and learning through practice. They discuss Belmont's practicum-focused approach to practice readiness, as well as higher-education concerns, including civic and historical knowledge, access to justice, competency standards, and responsible AI use.
Their advice: stay open, try different areas, and consider public service.
This episode was recorded prior to Deborah Farringer's elevation to Dean.
21 min
September 24Breaking into Northern Ireland's Legal Market: How to Win a Training Contract
What does Northern Ireland's legal market really look like, and what does it take to land a training contract? Host Sophia Kang is joined by Deirdre Timoney, Placement and Employability Officer at the School of Law, and Marie McKeown, Head of HR at Carson McDowell.
Deirdre describes a market that is more diverse and internationally connected than many students realise. It includes global and UK firms, the Big Four, in-house legal teams, legal tech and outsourcing providers, indigenous firms, and around 460 high-street practices, and it exports more than £150 million in legal services each year. She also explains how universities work with industry to build students' digital literacy and commercial awareness.
Marie walks through the main ways in: vacation schemes, internships, 100-hour placements and the two-year training contract. Both guests compare the solicitor and barrister routes through the Institute of Professional Legal Studies (IPLS). They make the case for engaging early and explain why recruiters assess the whole candidate rather than relying on prior legal experience or personal connections.
The episode closes with practical advice on:
writing applications and preparing for interviews
using AI responsibly
handling rejection
standing out through visibility, teamwork, research and continuous learning
48 min
July 16Number 51
In this deeply moving testimonial, author Marie Therese Rogers, whose memoir The Sins of the Mother chronicles her life story, reflects on a childhood shaped by adoption, institutional care, secrecy, and a lifelong search for answers.
Born in the early 1950s to an unmarried mother in County Donegal, Marie Therese was separated from her family shortly after birth. After a brief placement with an adoptive family, she was returned to institutional care and spent most of her childhood in Nazareth House, Belfast, where she became known not by her name, but by a number: 51.
Marie Therese describes growing up in a world of strict discipline, silence, and emotional deprivation. She recalls the daily routines, the lack of affection, limited education, and the psychological impact of never knowing who she was or where she came from. Her testimony offers a powerful personal insight into the experience of many children raised in religious institutions across Ireland during the twentieth century.
As an adult, Marie Therese embarked on a decades-long journey to uncover the truth about her origins. Through persistent requests for records, conversations with former staff, and her own investigative efforts, she gradually pieced together fragments of her family history. Along the way, she discovered unknown siblings, met members of her birth family, and uncovered evidence that challenged what she had previously been told about her adoption.
Her story speaks directly to many of the themes explored in our episodes on Adoptee Rights and Access to Records, including:
The importance of access to birth and adoption records.
The lifelong impact of institutionalisation and family separation.
The barriers adoptees often face when seeking information about their origins.
The emotional consequences of secrecy and withheld records.
The need for recognition, accountability, and support for those affected by historical adoption practices.
Despite repeated setbacks, Marie Therese's determination to uncover her past ultimately led her to write The Sins of the Mother, ensuring that her experiences—and those of many others—would not be forgotten.
Related LawPod Episodes
Adoptee Rights and Access to Records in Northern Irelandhttps://lawpod.org/podcast/adoptee-rights-and-access-to-records-in-northern-ireland/
Adoptee Rights and Access to Records – Part IIhttps://lawpod.org/podcast/adoptee-rights-and-access-to-records-part-ii/
Further Reading
Marie Therese Rogers Moloney, The Sins of the Mother
A memoir detailing Marie Therese's experiences of adoption, institutional care, and her search for identity and belonging.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sins-Mother-Marie-Therese-Rogers-Moloney/dp/1780730659
Content Note
This episode contains personal accounts relating to adoption, family separation, institutional care, emotional and physical abuse, and trauma. Some listeners may find the content distressing. Support is available through adoption and counselling services for anyone affected by the themes discussed.
41 min
June 25 Humanitarian Forensics and the Disappeared: Oran Finegan on Dignity, Trust, and Accountability
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).
Finegan 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.
33 min
May 20From Copyright Infringement to Superintelligence: The Legal and Philosophical Future of AI
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.
51 min
May 14 Punishment, Politics, and Legal Plunder: Joshua Page on the Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice
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.
37 min
May 07The Duty to Assist: Law, Risk and Responsibility
What does the law expect us to do when another person is in immediate danger? And what happens when someone steps in to help — but is injured in the process?
In this episode of LawPod, Dr Rosie Cowan and student host Eva Richards speak with Eoin Campbell, a Queen’s graduate and lecturer in legal English in Lyon, France. Eoin shares a powerful and deeply personal account of intervening during a violent attack in a residential car park in France, where he and another passer-by helped save a young woman’s life.
The episode uses Eoin’s experience to explore the legal and moral questions surrounding the duty to assist: a concept recognised in French criminal law, but approached very differently in UK and common law systems.
Content note
This episode includes discussion of a violent assault, strangulation, serious injury, trauma, post-traumatic stress, and the aftermath of criminal proceedings. Listener discretion is advised.
About the episode
In UK law, there is generally no broad criminal duty to rescue or intervene simply because another person is in danger. Duties to act usually arise only in particular situations — for example, where there is a special relationship, professional responsibility, assumption of care, or where a person has created a danger.
French law takes a different approach (Article 223-6 of the French Penal Code). It recognises a more general obligation to assist a person in danger, provided that assistance can be given without serious risk to the rescuer or others. This principle is often discussed in terms of non-assistance à personne en danger — broadly, failure to assist a person in danger.
Eoin’s story brings this legal idea into sharp focus. His intervention was not abstract or theoretical. It happened in seconds, under pressure, and with serious consequences. The episode asks not only whether people should help, but also what support should exist for those who do.
Key themes
1. The duty to assist in French law
The conversation introduces the French idea that a person may have a legal duty to help someone in serious danger. That does not necessarily mean physically intervening in every case. Assistance might include calling emergency services, alerting others, or using available safety equipment.
Eoin gives the example of seeing someone in difficulty in the sea. A bystander may not be required to swim out and risk their own life, but they may be expected to call for help or throw a life ring if one is available.
This distinction matters: the law may encourage assistance, but it does not generally require a person to take unreasonable risks.
2. The limits of legal duties in moments of crisis
One of the most striking parts of the episode is the gap between legal theory and real-life decision-making. As Eoin explains, when he saw the attack unfold, he was not weighing legal obligations or statutory wording. He saw someone in immediate danger and acted.
That raises a difficult question: if the law says a person should help “if they can”, how realistic is it to expect someone to assess risk calmly in the middle of a violent emergency?
The episode explores this tension between:
legal duty;
moral instinct;
personal safety;
public expectations; and
the reality of split-second decisions.
3. The UK and common law contrast
Rosie places the discussion in its wider legal context by contrasting the French approach with the UK position. In common law systems, criminal liability is usually more cautious about punishing omissions — that is, failures to act.
This does not mean that UK law is indifferent to people in danger. Rather, it tends to impose duties to act only in defined circumstances, such as where someone has responsibility for a child, patient, employee, or person in their care.
The episode therefore raises a broader philosophical question: should law require solidarity between strangers, or should intervention remain primarily a matter of personal conscience?
4. Public messaging and state responsibility
A central issue in the episode is whether public authorities can encourage people to intervene without also providing clear protection or support for those who are injured as a result.
Eoin reflects on public campaigns urging people to challenge harassment, violence, and threatening behaviour. He does not reject the moral value behind those campaigns. Instead, he asks what should happen afterwards if someone does step in and suffers physical, psychological, or financial harm.
This is one of the episode’s most important questions:
If the state encourages people to protect others, what duty does the state owe to the people who do the protecting?
5. Compensation, recognition, and procedural uncertainty
Eoin also discusses the aftermath of the incident, including his hand injury, later diagnosis of PTSD, loss of earnings, and attempts to obtain recognition or compensation.
His experience highlights the complexity of being neither the original target of the attack nor a conventional complainant, but someone injured while helping another person. The episode does not present this as a simple legal answer. Instead, it uses Eoin’s experience to expose a possible gap between public expectations of bystander intervention and the systems available to support interveners afterwards.
The discussion also touches on the importance of clear information for people involved in traumatic incidents: what to report, whether to seek medical evidence, how to preserve legal options, and where to find advice.
Why this episode matters
This episode is about more than one act of bravery. It asks how law understands responsibility between strangers.
Most people would hope that if they were attacked, someone nearby would help. But the law has to answer harder questions. How much help can be expected? What if helping is dangerous? Does the answer change depending on a person’s age, strength, training, or professional background? And if someone is injured while assisting, should they be treated as a victim too?
Eoin’s account makes these questions immediate and human. It shows that legal duties are not just rules in books. They operate — or fail to operate — in moments of fear, confusion, violence, and uncertainty.
Questions explored in the episode
Is there a legal duty to help a stranger in danger?
How does French law differ from UK and common law approaches?
What does “assistance” actually require?
Does the law expect physical intervention, or can calling for help be enough?
How should the law account for personal risk?
Should someone injured while helping another person be entitled to compensation?
What responsibilities do public authorities have when they encourage bystander intervention?
Can law reflect moral solidarity without placing unrealistic burdens on individuals?
Legal note
This episode discusses legal concepts in general terms and through the personal experience of the guest. It is not legal advice. The legal position may depend on jurisdiction, factual context, procedural rules, and the specific wording of relevant legislation. Listeners facing similar issues should seek advice from a qualified legal professional in the relevant jurisdiction.
Privacy and sensitivity note
The episode discusses a real incident involving serious violence. Names and identifying details of private individuals involved in the attack are not used. The focus of the discussion is on the legal, ethical, and policy questions arising from the event.
28 min
April 23 Digital Investigations Lab (Part 2)
Learning, Trauma, and Truth: A Student Perspective on Digital Investigations
What does it mean to learn law by documenting real harm in real time?
In Part 2 of this two‑episode LawPod series, host Eva Richards is joined by Kenzie Brodie and Briana Mallon, postgraduate students at Queen's University Belfast, to explore the Digital Investigations Lab from the inside. This episode centres the student experience: how it feels to learn open source investigation techniques while working with traumatic material, contested narratives, and the very real lives behind the data.
Rather than theory or institutional design, this conversation focuses on practice, the tools students actually use, the cases that stayed with them, the skills they didn't expect to develop, and how doing this work has reshaped the way they think about law, evidence, and responsibility.
It is a frank, reflective discussion about learning by doing, and about the emotional and ethical dimensions of researching war crimes from a distance.
26 min
April 16 Digital Investigations Lab (Part 1)
Open Source Investigations, AI, and Accountability in Conflict
What happens when war crimes are filmed in real time — but truth itself becomes contested?
In this episode of LawPod, host Eva Richards is joined by Professor Luke Moffett and PhD researcher Lydia Millar, manager of QUB Law’s Digital Investigation Lab, for a deep dive into the fast‑evolving world of open source investigations and their growing importance for law, justice, and accountability.
Together, they unpack how publicly available information; from social media videos and satellite imagery to online records, is transforming how lawyers, academics, journalists, and civil society document conflict‑related harms. But they also confront the darker side of this digital revolution: disinformation, AI‑generated fakes, evidentiary scepticism in courtrooms, and widening global inequalities in who gets to investigate who's suffering.
This conversation moves from theory to practice, revealing how Queen’s Digital Investigation Lab has supported real‑world litigation and accountability efforts related to Gaza, Syria, Ukraine, and Sudan, and asks what comes next for this powerful and precarious field.
37 min
March 26 Adoptee Rights and Access to Records in Northern Ireland (Part II)
Dr Alice Diver hosts a follow‑up LawPod conversation with Sharon, Maeve, and Brigid from Adopt NI, continuing the discussion on adoptee rights, truth recovery, and Northern Ireland’s forthcoming redress legislation. Building on Episode 1, the guests analyse how the draft bill fails to reflect the human rights framework promised in earlier reports and how lived experience has been overlooked in policymaking.
They describe the gap between the Truth Recovery Report's human‑rights‑based recommendations and the bill now emerging: the exclusion of workhouse survivors; the omission of practices such as coercion, systemic separation of mothers and babies, and cross‑border adoption pathways; and the absence of a statutory right to personal records. Participants recount their frustration at being positioned as consultees only in appearance, with little genuine influence, and their exhaustion at repeatedly providing testimony that appears unread or unacted upon.
The conversation highlights the lifelong impacts of forced separation, trauma, loss of identity, intergenerational effects, and the emotional labour required to obtain fragmented or redacted records. They stress the need for a victims’ commissioner, mandatory access to archives, accountability for institutions (including state, church, and medical actors), and investment in research, education, and non‑repetition measures. Despite the barriers, the group emphasises the strength of peer support through Adopt NI and the ongoing commitment to advocacy and truth-telling.
There is one more episode forthcoming in this series.
Further Information
https://www.assemblyresearchmatters.org/2025/11/24/inquiry-mother-and-baby-institutions-magdalene-laundries-and-workhouses-and-redress-scheme-bill-a-brief-overview/
https://truthrecoverystrategy.com/reports/
Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture
2026 Conference — Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture
AdoptNI
Adoption UK Charity
Genetic Stigma in Law and Literature: Orphanhood, Adoption, and the Right to Reunion (Palgrave, 2024) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-46246-7
37 min

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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.

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