Personhood in the Age of Biolegality - Brave New Law

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.

Marc de Leeuw is Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and convener of the UNSW Law Initiative for Biolegalities (IBL). His book Homo Capax. Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology is forthcoming.
Sonja van Wichelen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Director of the Biopolitics of Science Research Network. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (2018) and Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (2010).