Biolegality
Description
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the empirical and theoretical problems posed by the encounter between law and biology in the twenty-first century. How does biotechnology and new bioscientific knowledge affect our legal institutions, our sense of justice, and our ways of relating to one another? To answer these questions, authors Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen examine the complex and often contested ways in which biotechnology and biological knowledge are reworked by, with, and against legal knowledge. As this book shows, recent developments in the life sciences-including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences-and their applications in forensics, medicine, and agriculture test longstanding legal forms, such as property, personhood, parenthood, and (collective) identity, ultimately constituting the current field of "biolegality." The authors argue that these biolegal contestations represent philosophical and anthropological challenges to existing understandings of exchange, self, kinship, and community. By addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing, the book proposes a programmatic intervention, asserting the pivotal role the study of biolegality plays in advancing social and political theory.
Reviews / Votes
"
Biolegality
offers a fascinating account of how advances in biotechnology shape our legal institutions and practices while simultaneously creating new ways for communities and societies to relate to biomedical knowledge, including genes, brains, bodies, and babies. Drawing upon an impressive range of disciplines, they convincingly demonstrate how biotechnological knowledge transforms legal knowledge and entities, reconstructs the biomedical disciplines and nature itself, and shifts the social order. This is a must-read book." (Myles W. Jackson, Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA)
"
Biolegality. A Critical Introduction
offers an excellent account on the manifold constellations of law and biology in contemporary societies. Drawing on science and technology studies, political theory and legal anthropology, the book attends to the co-production of legal knowledge and biotechnological practices and convincingly shows how they challenge our understanding of the human and reconfigure concepts of property, personhood, kinship, community and identity." (Thomas Lemke, Professor of Sociology with Focus on Biotechnologies, Nature and Society, Goethe University Frankfurt)
"Moving well past existing research that connects the separate regimes of law and the biosciences, this book illuminates their coproduction in the generative field of
biolegalities
. Van Wichelen and de Leeuw offer a significant theoretical advance in defining this compelling new paradigm. Drawing on many exemplars from the latest practical developments, they offer cutting-edge insight into the ecology of tensions and transitions in politics, life, biotechnology and law that continue to unsettle and shape the legalities surrounding human conditions of existence." (Margaret Davies, Professor - Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, Flinders University, Australia)
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Persons
Sonja van Wichelen is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology with the School for Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research broadly engages with the body, law, and science in the age of globalization. She is the author of Legitimating Life (2018) and Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia (2010).
Marc de Leeuw is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His work engages with philosophical anthropology, law, bioscience, and AI. He is the author of Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology (2021), and co-editor of Personhood in the Age of Biolegality (2020).
Content
Introduction: Biolegality as Critical Intervention.- Part I: Law and Life.- From Nature to Biology.- The Biotechnology Revolution.- Part II: Biolegal Rearrangement.- Genes - Exchange and Property.- Brains - Self and Personhood.- Babies - Kinship and Parenthood.- Bodies - Community and Identity.- Coda: The Biolegality of Viruses.