Table Of Content

BIOLEGALITIES Personhood in the Age of Biolegality Brave New Law Edited by Marc de Leeuw · Sonja van Wichelen Biolegalities Series Editors Marc de Leeuw Law University of New South Wales Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia Sonja van Wichelen Sociology and Social Policy University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia This interdisciplinary series on Biolegalities engages with contempo- rary challenges and implications of new biotechnologies and biological knowledges in the field of law. Our series aims to open up a much broader understanding of biolegality that includes a range of biotechnologies and biological knowledge, expanding into areas of immigra- tion law, trade law, labor law, environmental law, patent law, family law, human rights law, and international law. While the growing scholarship on biopolitics has studied the ways in which such practices are entangled with certain modes of governance and neoliberal economies, their trans- lations, deployments, and reconfigurations in the realm of law or legal practice has been relatively understudied. The main objective of this book series is to provide a venue for the study of the complex and often contested ways in which biotechnologies or biological knowledges are reworked by, with, and against legal knowledge. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15629 Marc de Leeuw · Sonja van Wichelen Editors Personhood in the Age of Biolegality Brave New Law Editors Marc de Leeuw Sonja van Wichelen Law Sociology and Social Policy University of New South Wales Sydney University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia Sydney, NSW, Australia Biolegalities ISBN 978-3-030-27847-2 ISBN 978-3-030-27848-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27848-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: imagenavi/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In memory of Sam, a dear colleague and bright scholar who left us much too early. A cknowledgements This edited collection is the result of an international workshop Brave New Law! Legal Personhood in the New Biosciences, which was held in late August 2018, at the University of Sydney and organized by the Biopolitics of Science Research Network. The workshop brought together 33 scholars from around the world to discuss changes in and transformations of legal personhood considering recent bioscientific developments. The premise of the workshop was that complex issues were emerging in the intersection of law and biology, an area of law that was quickly expanding and displaying highly composite problems that challenge existing legal regimes. Key questions included: What do the new biosciences do to our social, cultural, and legal conceptions of personhood? How does our legal apparatus incorporate new legitima- tions from the emerging biosciences into their knowledge systems? And what kind of ethical, socio-political, but also scientific consequences are attached to the establishment of such new legalities? By bringing together legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, cultural theorists, and political philosophers, the aim of the workshop was to examine these problems by looking at materialities, the posthuman, and the relational in the (un)making of legalities, but also to critically assess the “newness” of these legalities, and to compare them with earlier inves- tigations of natural personhood. Fourteen papers were presented, and fourteen other international scholars gave generous comments that helped develop the papers presented in this volume. We would like to thank them here for their vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS insightful papers, considerate reading of participants’ papers, insightful feedback, and lively discussion: Courtney Addison, Sascha Callaghan, Margaret Davies, Nadine Ehlers, Jennifer Hamilton, Fleur Johns, Isabel Karpin, Hannah Landecker, Thomas Lemke, Cressida Limon, Neil MacLean, Maurizio Meloni, Catherine Mills, Karen O’Connell, Bronwyn Parry, Shobita Parthasarathy, Vincenzo Pavone, Brad Sherman, Margrit Shildrick, Halam Stevens, Cameron Stewart, Samuel Taylor- Alexander, Catherine Trundle, Britta van Beers, Robert Van Krieken, Miguel Vatter, Ayo Wahlberg, and Catherine Waldby. Our conversations continued at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science which was held a few days later at the Convention Centre in Sydney and where the editors organized two consecutive panels on legal personhood and the new biosciences. More thought-provoking papers were presented in these panels, and we thank Seamus Barker, Shun-Ling Chen, Myra Cheng, Zsuzsanna Ihar, Jaya Keaney, and Declan Kuch for their participation. We are very grateful to Torsten Heinemann who took up the role of discussing these 4S papers. A special thanks to David Delaney—who was not able to come to the workshop—but who generously offered and provided a truly engaging afterword to our collection. The workshop was part of the Biolegality Pop-Up Research Lab, an initiative from the Sydney Social Science, Humanities, and Arts Research Centre (SSSHARC) and Sonja would like to thank its director Professor Nick Enfield for making biolegality a research priority in the faculty and for generously funding the initiative. Claire Stevens and Zsuzsanna Ihar were indispensable in successfully preparing the pop-up events and were essential to making the workshop run smoothly and to lively (social media) engagements with people in and outside of the workshop. Sonja would also like to acknowledge the funding she received from the Australian Research Council for Early Career Researchers (DECRA, project number DE140100348) which allowed the initial ideas and writing of this project. She also acknowledges the SOAR scheme at the University of Sydney which generously allowed her teaching buy out to work on this project. Marc would like to thank UNSW Law for supporting the Initiative for Biolegalities, of which he is the convener, and the financial support for several symposia between 2015 and 2018 (The “Biological Turn” in Law: A Critical Appraisal; The Seeds of Law: Monsanto, Patents and the Public Good; and Natural and Unnatural Threats: Pandemics & the Global Governance of Health and Biosecurity). He would also like to thank all ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix participants whose talks and debates greatly enhanced his understanding of what is at stake in the biolegal dynamic. Marc also thanks the newly created UNSW Allen’s Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation (where he is research leader for the research stream “Hybrid Life and Legal Personhood”) for supporting his work. In preparing the manuscript we would like to thank our editor Rachel Daniel for taking on this project, for her intellectual commitment to supporting scholarship from science and technology studies, and for her meticulous reading of the manuscript. Madison Allums has been extremely helpful in attending to our questions and last-minute requests. The research assistance from Pradytia Pertiwi has been exceptional. Sonja would like to thank her for her keen enthusiasm and meticulous work in bringing the manuscript to completion. c ontents 1 Brave New Law: Personhood in the Age of Biolegality 1 Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen Part I Troubling Persons 2 Spectral Personas: Exploring the Constitution and Legal Standing of “Virtual Personhood” 21 Bronwyn Parry 3 The Political Economy of Neurolaw: Can Neurolaw Destabilize the Neoliberal Discourse About Human Behavior? 39 Delphine Rabet 4 Legal Personhood in Postgenomic Times: Plasticity, Rights, and Relationality 55 Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen xi