I know it's an unpopular and minority opinion, but I hate "Measure of a Man".

(Before I get too far into this: I do like Guinan's one conversation with Picard about disposable people. Within the context of the episode, that conversation was very good. It's the existence of the context that bugs me.)

Aside from the "30-minute landmark trial setting landmark legal precedent" that bugs me on any TV show (something that important would take longer to be resolved. There were zero time constraints on Maddox's research. He could have waited an extra two weeks, months, or years for a proper hearing and would have been no worse off, so there was no reason for the JAG to treat it as something that "we have to make do" over), it seems so out of character for the Federation to treat Data like property in the first place.

Unlike the United States in the days of Dred Scott, the Federation is a really, really heterogeneous society . . . and one that gets along really well, at least on the surface. The same Federation that is routinely concerned with the personhood of microbial colonies, or the ability of crystals to feel, is not going to treat Data as the one single non-person being in the entire Universe. It's so contrived.

And especially not after allowing him to enlist in Starfleet and awarding him rank as an officer. Who the aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks considers something as property and simultaneously allows it and it alone to engage in behavior that only persons have heretofore been allowed to engage in? The ship's replicators were never enrolled in Starfleet, yet somehow nobody has questioned Data's status as a person until he's a Lt. Commander in the fleet? That question should have been resolved when he went to enlist, if it ever occurred to anyone.

It would be like . . . if there was an episode of Voyager where suddenly the whole ship got in a fight with each other about evolution vs. creationism. DS9 had to go back in time (repeatedly) to deal with poverty and racial strife, which felt so much more natural than this episode.

It isn't something they seem to deal with anymore, so one dramatic occurrence of it feels artificial and forced.