This volume showcases emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that captures the complex ways in which biological knowledge is testing the nature and structure of legal personhood. Key questions include: What do the new biosciences do to our social, cultural, and legal conceptions of personhood? How does our legal apparatus incorporate new legitimations from the emerging biosciences into its knowledge system? And what kind of ethical, socio-political, and scientific consequences are attached to the establishment of such new legalities? The book examines these problems by looking at materialities, the posthuman, and the relational in the (un)making of legalities. Themes and topics include postgenomic research, gene editing, neuroscience, epigenetics, precision medicine, regenerative medicine, reproductive technologies, border technologies, and theoretical debates in legal theory on the relationship between persons, property, and rights.
Author(s): Marc de Leeuw, Sonja Van Wichelen
Series: Biolegalities
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 267
Tags: Science And Technology Studies
Front Matter ....Pages i-xx
Brave New Law: Personhood in the Age of Biolegality (Marc de Leeuw, Sonja van Wichelen)....Pages 1-17
Front Matter ....Pages 19-19
Spectral Personas: Exploring the Constitution and Legal Standing of “Virtual Personhood” (Bronwyn Parry)....Pages 21-38
The Political Economy of Neurolaw: Can Neurolaw Destabilize the Neoliberal Discourse About Human Behavior? (Delphine Rabet)....Pages 39-54
Legal Personhood in Postgenomic Times: Plasticity, Rights, and Relationality (Marc de Leeuw, Sonja van Wichelen)....Pages 55-72
Front Matter ....Pages 73-73
Translating Proof: Contested Illness, Radiation Exposure, and the Health Claims of Nuclear Test Veterans (Catherine Trundle)....Pages 75-90
Paradigm Change, Law, and Persons: Producing Legal Responsibility for Pain (Seamus Barker)....Pages 91-107
Racial Futurity: Biolegality and the Question of Black Life (Nadine Ehlers)....Pages 109-123
Front Matter ....Pages 125-125
Phenotypic Personhood: Epigenetics and the Biolegality of Processing Asylum (Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar)....Pages 127-147
CRISPR Cowboys? Genetic Self-Experimentation and the Limits of the Person (Courtney Addison)....Pages 149-166
In Genes We Trust: Genetic Privacy in the Age of Precision Medicine (Dean Southwood)....Pages 167-183
Front Matter ....Pages 185-185
“The Obsolescence of Human Beings” and the Non-obsolescence of Law’s Natural Persons: Transformations of Legal Personhood Through the Lens of “Promethean Shame” (Britta van Beers)....Pages 187-204
Distributed Cognition, Distributed Being, and the Foundations of Law (Margaret Davies)....Pages 205-223
Nature’s Law or Law’s Law? Community of Life, Legal Personhood, and Trusts (Miguel Vatter)....Pages 225-245
Afterword: After the Great Undoing (David Delaney)....Pages 247-255
Back Matter ....Pages 257-261
