What rights do humans have when it comes to contact with unknown intelligences? Who protects those rights if the phenomenon remains unacknowledged by governments?
What legal frameworks exist, or need to be created, to govern nonhuman encounters, space exploration, or interdimensional contact?
What does consent mean in situations of abduction, missing time, or unexplained bodily harm? Who investigates, and how do we offer support?
What happens when individuals or institutions claim to receive technological knowledge through nonhuman contact? Who owns that knowledge?
If recovered materials or craft have been reverse-engineered, who holds the patents, and should they? What ethical questions arise from inventions with potentially nonhuman origins?
How have patterns of innovation in history mirrored sudden leaps in technology? Could past advances have unacknowledged or mysterious sources?
What does bodily autonomy mean in the face of experimentation, implants, or altered memory, especially when no human perpetrator can be identified?
What counts as a crime in a contact scenario? Who decides what is moral or ethical in the face of the unknown?
Could new forms of law arise to recognize the rights of experiencers, or even the rights of nonhuman intelligences?
How have past legal systems dealt with claims of supernatural or anomalous experiences? What can we learn from history?
If a government or agency holds recovered craft or bodies, what ethical responsibility do they have to the public? To science? To experiencers?
How can students explore ideas of justice, responsibility, and dignity even when the questions extend beyond Earth or the material world?