Life and the Law: Configuring the Human

First Annual Lecture in Health and Law.

Professor Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Professor Jasanoff will be looking at new imaginaries of health and illness arising from techniques that allow the body to be freed from its phenotypic constraints, thus no longer relating the body's integrity, wholeness or soundness to its physical contours, or even to its identifiable organs and parts. Digitization and imaging techniques, combined with genetic understandings, have made the body more transparent, more fluid, more temporally manipulable than at any time in history.

Professor Jasanoff will discuss these changes and what they imply for legal thought, which has tended to be governed by rough and ready physical criteria of what counts as being inside or outside the body and its zones of integrity or privacy. She will analyze how these changes in biological and legal thought intersect with market developments, from organ trade to embryo donation.

Aknowledgments

This conference is made possible by a grant from the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee, the McGill Research Group on Health and Law, and the Associate Dean (Research) Office, McGill Faculty of Law.