The rules underneatheveryday life.
Terms & Conditions examines the systems, technologies, institutions, and agreements that shape how we live — and asks who designed them, who benefits, and what could be built differently.
Every systemhas terms.
Every day we move through systems we rarely get to negotiate — money, payments, housing, technology, data, work, public services, and the rules governing them.
Terms & Conditions makes those systems visible.
It asks:
Who built them?
Who do they work for?
Who gets excluded?
And what could we build differently?
Conversation
Long-form interviews with policymakers, researchers, organizers, technologists, artists, and practitioners.
Explanation
Clear, accessible breakdowns of complicated systems without flattening their complexity.
Research
Ideas emerging from law, economics, technology, public infrastructure, and political economy.
Public life
Connecting technical debates to the consequences people experience in everyday life.
Where Law × Technology × Public Life Meet
University of Manchester Law & Technology Initiative
The Manchester Law & Technology Initiative explores how technological change is reshaping the laws, institutions, and infrastructure that organize everyday life. Its work brings together questions of technology, regulation, institutional design, and the public interest — from the future of money and payments to artificial intelligence, privacy, data, and digital infrastructure.
At the center of that work is a broader question: how should new technologies be governed, who should they serve, and what kinds of institutions do we need around them? That means looking beyond what technology can do to examine the systems of ownership, rules, rights, and public capacity that determine how it is actually experienced.
Terms & Conditions: The Fine Print extends those questions into public conversation. The show starts with the systems people encounter every day — how money moves, how technology makes decisions, who controls essential infrastructure — and works backward to uncover the rules and institutions underneath them.
Law × Technology × Public Life
Research → Conversation → Public Understanding
Explore the Manchester Law & Technology Initiative ↗How we approach the work
Public value
Start with what systems should enable people and communities to do.
Accessibility
Explain complexity without requiring people to become specialists.
Independence
Ask difficult questions across government, finance, technology, and political institutions.
Curiosity
Treat disagreement and uncertainty as reasons to investigate more deeply.
Accountability
Examine not only what institutions intend, but what their systems actually produce.
Chastity Murphy
Policy strategist, researcher & former U.S. Treasury advisor
Chastity Murphy is a policy strategist and researcher whose work focuses on the systems underneath economic life — money, payments, technology, public infrastructure, financial regulation, and economic power. She previously served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where her work included digital payments, digital assets, artificial intelligence in financial services, financial inclusion, consumer protection, and the future of money.
Today, she is a Visiting Research Fellow with the University of Manchester Law & Technology Initiative and a Roosevelt Institute fellow, researching public financial infrastructure, digital public money, privacy-preserving payments, and the institutions needed to govern new technologies in the public interest. Through Terms & Conditions, she brings those worlds into public conversation, making the systems that shape everyday life easier to see, question, and understand.
Money × Technology × Public Infrastructure × Economic Power
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