Reframing Rights Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age

by Jasanoff, Sheila

• ISBN13: 9780262516273
• ISBN10: 0262516276
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-22
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Legal texts have been with us since the dawn of human history. Beginning in 1953, life too became textual. The discovery of the structure of DNA made it possible to represent the basic matter of life with permutations and combinations of four letters of the alphabet, A, T, C, and G. Since then, the biological and legal conceptions of life have been in constant, mutually constitutive interplay--the former focusing on life's definition, the latter on life's entitlements. Reframing Rights argues that this period of transformative change in law and the life sciences should be considered "bioconstitutional."Reframing Rights explores the evolving relationship of biology, biotechnology, and law through a series of national and cross-national case studies. Sheila Jasanoff maps out the conceptual territory in a substantive editorial introduction, after which the contributors offer "snapshots" of developments at the frontiers of biotechnology and the law. Chapters examine such topics as national cloning and xenotransplant policies; the politics of stem cell research in Britain, Germany, and Italy; DNA profiling and DNA databases in criminal law; clinical trials in India and the United States; the GM crop controversy in Britain; and precautionary policymaking in the European Union. These cases demonstrate changes of constitutional significance in the relations among human bodies, selves, science, and the state.

Author Biography

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States and other books and the coeditor of Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2004)

Table of Contents

Series Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Rewriting Life, Reframing Rights	p. 1
States of Eugenics: Institutions and Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California	p. 29
Making the Facts of Life	p. 59
More than Just a Nucleus: Cloning and the Alignment of Scientific and Political Rationalities	p. 85
Between Church and State: Stem Cells, Embryos, and Citizens in Italian Politics	p. 105
Certainty vs. Finality: Constitutional Rights to Postconviction DNA Testing	p. 125
Judical Imaginaries of Technology: Constitutional Law and the Forensic DNA Database	p. 147
Risks and Rights in Xenotransplantation	p. 169
Two Tales of Genomics: Capital, Epistemology, and Global Constitutions of the Biomedical Subject	p. 193
Human Population Genomics and the Dilemma of Difference	p. 217
Despotism and Democracy in the United Kingdom: Experiments in Reframing Citizenship	p. 239
Representing Europe with the Precautionary Principle	p. 263
Conclusion	p. 287
Series List	p. 297
List of Contributors	p. 299
Index	p. 303
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