New developments in biotechnology radically alter our relationship with our bodies. Body tissues can now be used for commercial purposes, while external objects, such as pacemakers, can become part of the body. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives transcends the everyday responses to such developments, suggesting that what we most fear is the feminisation of the body. We fear our bodies are becoming objects of property, turning us into things rather than persons. This book evaluates how well-grounded this fear is, and suggests innovative models of regulating what has been called 'the new Gold Rush' in human tissue. This is an up-to-date and wide-ranging synthesis of market developments in body tissue, bringing together bioethics, feminist theory and lessons from countries that have resisted commercialisation of the body, in a theoretically sophisticated and practically significant approach.
In Body Parts, E. Richard Gold examines whether the body and materials derived from it--such as human organs and DNA--should be thought of as market commodities and subject to property law. Analyzing a series of court decisions concerning property rights, Gold explores whether the language and assumptions of property law can help society determine who has rights to human biological materials. Gold observes that the commercial opportunities unleashed by advances in biotechnology present a challenge to the ways that society has traditionally valued the human body and human health. In a balanced discussion of both commercial and individual perspectives, Gold asserts the need to understand human biological materials within the context of human values, rather than economic interests. This perceptive book will be welcomed by scholars and other professionals engaged in questions regarding bioethics, applied ethics, the philosophy of value, and property and intellectual property rights. Given the international aspects of both intellectual property law and biotechnology, this book will be of interest throughout the world and especially valuable in common-law (most English-speaking) countries.
What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, Luck unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict. Luck challenges accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and “virtualization.” The book also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.
How ought the law to deal with novel challenges regarding the use and control of human biomaterials? As it stands the law is ill-equipped to deal with these. Quigley argues that advancing biotechnology means that the law must confront and move boundaries which it has constructed; in particular, those which delineate property from non-property in relation to biomaterials. Drawing together often disparate strands of property discourse, she offers a philosophical and legal re-analysis of the law in relation to property in the body and biomaterials. She advances a new defence, underpinned by self-ownership, of the position that persons ought to be seen as the prima facie holders of property rights in their separated biomaterials. This book will appeal to those interested in medical and property law, philosophy, bioethics, and health policy amongst others.
Do you own your body? Advances in science and the development of genetic databases have added an aura of modern controversy to this long-standing and, as yet, unresolved problem. In particular, English law governing separated human tissue (including organs, DNA and cell-lines) is unsatisfactory. Despite the enactment of the Human Tissue Act 2004 UK, it remains uncertain what property rights living persons can claim over tissue separated from their bodies. The development of clear legal principles is necessary to protect the rights of individuals while also enabling the efficient use of such materials in medical research. Part I of Law and the Human Body traces the evolution of English, Australian, United States and Canadian law in relation to human tissue separated from living persons and dead bodies. This includes a comprehensive examination of the Human Tissue Act 2004 UK as well as prominent judicial decisions, including Re Organ Retention Group Litigation [2005] QB 506, Colavito v New York Organ Donor Network Inc 8 NY 3d 43 (NY CA 2006) and Washington University v Catalona 490 F 3d 667 (8th Cir 2007). Analysis demonstrates that, although property rights and non-proprietary interests in separated human tissue are recognised in limited circumstances, no principled basis has been accepted either at common law or by statute for the recognition of these rights and interests. Part II of this book develops and defends a principled basis in English law for the creation and legal recognition of property rights and non-proprietary interests in separated human tissue. Significantly, the analysis and principles presented in Law and the Human Body have application across common law and civil law jurisdictions worldwide.
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law addresses some of the most critical issues facing scholars, legislators, and judges today: how to protect against threats to public health that can quickly cross national borders, how to ensure access to affordable health care, and how to regulate the pharmaceutical industry, among many others. When matters of life and death literally hang in the balance, it is especially important for policymakers to get things right, and the making of policy can be greatly enhanced by learning from the successes and failures of approaches taken in other countries. Where there are "common challenges" in law and health, there is much to be gained from experiences elsewhere. Thus, for example, countries that suffered early from the COVID-19 pandemic provided valuable lessons about public health interventions for countries that were hit later. Accordingly, the Handbook considers key health law questions from a comparative perspective. In health law, common challenges are frequent. In addition to ones already mentioned, there are questions about addressing the social determinants of health (e.g., poverty and pollution), organizing health systems to optimize use of available resources, ensuring that physicians provide care of the highest quality, protecting patient privacy in a data-driven world, and properly balancing patient autonomy with the interest in preserving life when reproductive and end-of-life decisions are made. This Handbook's wide scope and comparative take on health law are particularly timely. Economic globalization has made it increasingly important for different countries to harmonize their legal rules. Students, practitioners, scholars, and policymakers need to understand how health laws vary across national boundaries and how reforms can ensure a convergence toward an optimal set of legal rules, or ensure that specific legal arrangements are needed in particular contexts. Indeed, comparative analysis has become essential for legal scholars, and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law is the only resource that provides such an analysis in health law.
A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity. Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.
Disputes over the use and storage of bodily material continue to arise but the law has no clear answer as to the legal status of bodily material. This book develops a way for the law to address disputes over the use and storage of bodily material that, contrary to the current trend, resists the application of property law.
At the onset of Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Leon Kass gives us a status report on where we stand today: “Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic ‘enhancement,’ for wholesale redesign. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come for paying attention.” Trained as a medical doctor and biochemist, Dr. Kass has become one of our most provocative thinkers on bioethical issues. In Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, he has written a book that grapples with the moral meaning of the new biomedical technologies now threatening to take us back to the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In a series of mediations on cloning, embryo research, the sale of organs, and the assault on mortality itself, Kass questions the wisdom of trying to break down the natural boundaries given us and to remake the human body into an instrument of our will. He also attempts to chart a course by which we might avoid the dehumanization of biotechnical “recreationism” without rejecting modern science or rejecting its genuine contributions to human welfare. Leon Kass writes profoundly about the limits of science and the limits of life, about what makes us human and gives us human dignity. Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity.
