Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age

13. Conclusion

13 Conclusion Sheila Jasanoff Revolutionary changes in the scientific representation and technological malleability of living matter in the twentieth century entailed equally farreaching changes in the accommodation of life, especially human life, within the legal cultures of nation states. This book’s principal objective has been to trace some of the most significant shifts, from disparate but complementary perspectives and with a diversity of methods, showing how they fit within a framework that we call bioconstitutionalism. The cases recounted here represent on one level snapshots of transformations still in progress. Each chapter analyzes the responses of a particular kind of institution—hospital, ethics committee, court, scientific society, biotech company, regulatory authority, science policy agency, and even the Catholic Church—to specific biological ideas, constructs, instruments, and practices. Taken together, however, these cases point toward fundamental realignments in the legal and ethical relations between human beings, their bodies, their families and genetic kin, their relationships with other species, and their institutions and norms of government. By drawing together approaches from the history of science, science and technology studies, law and legal philosophy, bioethics, and comparative politics this interdisciplinary collection seeks to make sense of a technoscientific revolution that is at the same time also a revolution in humanity’s capacity for self-understanding and self-control. Observers of biology and society have regaled us in recent years with an array of new constructs built on the morpheme “bio,” or its more ample partner “biological.” Beginning with Michel Foucault’s seminal concepts of biopower and biopolitics, the lexicon of the social sciences and public policy now also includes terms like biocapital, biohazard, bioidentity, bionationalism, biosafety, biosecurity, biosociality, biosocieties, and biological citizenship. Meanwhile, science and technology have been busily deploying their own creative energies, with coinages such as bioaccumulation, 288 Chapter 13 biofuels, bioluminescence, and bioremediation. In a terminological world that seems at times oversaturated with bioliveliness, why introduce yet another compound? What does “bioconstitutionalism” add to our understanding of the dynamics of science and law, or of life’s changing social meanings? Does it amplify or elaborate on the sizeable analytic literatures that have already grown up around genetics and the life sciences? Does it contribute to conceptual clarity and responsible stewardship? We argue that it does all this and more. The developments described in the preceding pages can be seen, in effect, as elements of a deep-going transformation in the relations between life and law, responding to the transgressive nature of the new biosciences and biotechnologies. As biology crosses conceptual lines that have long been foundational to legal thought—between life and nonlife, human and nonhuman, individual and collective, predictable and unpredictable—we see in progress a profound rethinking of the rights, duties, entitlements, and needs of living entities in relation to law and the state. A capacious concept is needed to alert us to this phenomenon and to illuminate its multiple facets, a concept moreover that allows us to look beyond the courts to other places in society where significant principled adjustments to new representations of life are taking place. Bioconstitutionalism serves that purpose. This conclusion seeks to abstract from the specific case studies some more general observations about the nature of bioconstitutionalism and its possible evolution in the twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter also highlights the book’s contributions to legal and social theory, bioethics, and political thought. Rereading the Texts of Law We began by stressing the mutual interpolation of the texts of law and the “texts” of DNA. More than a metaphor, the continual interweaving of legal and scientific texts suggests a need to reconsider some of the limitations of classical legal analysis, which has tended to give primacy, and hence conceptual dominion, to its own command of the written word. The methods and analytic strategies adopted in this book argue for foundational changes in how we read and interpret the law for purposes of normative analysis. In this respect, the book serves as a primer not only for students of biology and society but also for critical studies of law and society in technologically advanced democracies. A recurrent point stressed by all the contributors is that context matters in regulating life, a point that theorists in search of pure principles tend to ignore. Thus, there is no singular way to determine whether or Conclusion 289 when a new biological construct is entitled...