Reframing Rights ─ Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age

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 thebasic 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, mutuallyconstitutive 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 sciencesshould be considered "bioconstitutional."Reframing Rights explores the evolvingrelationship of biology, biotechnology, and law through a series of national and cross-national casestudies. Sheila Jasanoff maps out the conceptual territory in a substantive editorial introduction,after which the contributors offer "snapshots" of developments at the frontiers ofbiotechnology and the law. Chapters examine such topics as national cloning and xenotransplantpolicies; the politics of stem cell research in Britain, Germany, and Italy; DNA profiling and DNAdatabases in criminal law; clinical trials in India and the United States; the GM crop controversyin Britain; and precautionary policymaking in the European Union. These cases demonstrate changes ofconstitutional significance in the relations among human bodies, selves, science, and thestate.

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).