Biolaw

In addition to bioethics and biopolitics, biolaw is also becoming more established.  It is a new field of law, with a new set of semantics, which has emerged in the face of new challenges facing society. Biolaw focuses on specific interventions, not only in the context of life and health but in the human constitution itself. Management of life might illustrate the center of attention. Reproductive cloning, “patents on life,” genetic diagnosis, enhancement and neuro-enhancement are t areas of controversy and raise many new questions which need to be resolved within the legal system. This is well-illustrated in criminal law, for example, in discussions on notions of guilt. From a public law perspective, forms of risk regulation—greater focus on procedural law and reflexion on the law, temporalization in the form of provisional and time-limited decisions, multi-layered generation of knowledge, public participation—are also used in biolaw. These, however, are not sufficient. The new area of biolaw illuminates the need for fundamental innovation and development in the field of law.

Marion Albers, 22.07.2014 / Marion.Albers@uni-hamburg.de