Marc de Leeuw - Personhood in the Age of Biolegality: Brave New Law

This interdisciplinary series onBiolegalitiesengages with contemporary 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 immigration 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 translations, 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

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This edited collection is the result of an international workshopBrave 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 legitimations 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 investigations 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 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 OConnell, 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 Delaneywho was not able to come to the workshopbut 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