Main description:

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.

Contents:

AcknowledgementsChapter 1. Brave New Law: Personhood in the Age of Biolegality PART I - TROUBLING PERSONSChapter 2. Spectral Personas: Exploring the Constitution and Legal Standing of "Virtual Personhood".Chapter 3. The Political Economy of Neurolaw: Can Neurolaw Destabilize the Neoliberal Discourse about Personal Responsibility?Chapter 4. Legal Personhood in Postgenomic Times: Plasticity, Rights, and RelationalityPART II - EVIDENCING PERSONSChapter 5. "The Proof is in my Chromosomes": Translating Radiation Exposure into Legal Liability and State Culpability.Chapter 6. Narrative Epistemology in Jurisprudence and Elective Affinities in Productions of Responsibility for Persons in PainChapter 7. Racial Futurity: Biolegality and the Question of Black Life PART III - GOVERNING PERSONSChapter 8. Evident Genomes: Phenotypic Personhood and the Epigenetic Processing of AsylumChapter 9. CRISPR Cowboys? Genetic Self-Experimentation and the Limits of the PersonChapter 10. In Genes We Trust: Genetic Privacy in the Age of Precision MedicinePART IV - THE FUTURE OF PERSONSChapter 11."The Obsolescence of Human Beings" and the Future of Law's Natural Persons: Transformations of Legal Personhood Through the Lens of "Promethean ShameChapter 12. Distributed Cognition, Distributed Persons, and the Foundations of LawChapter 13. Legal Personality in Trusts and CorporationsChapter 14. Afterword: After the Great Undoing