Biology, Law, and Public Reason

The project compares interactions between biology and the law in Britain, Germany, and the US. Combining expertise in biology, law, and political theory, the project clarifies how biology and the law conceptualize each other's roles in regulating new biological entities that disrupt the boundaries between life and none-life, human and non-human, and persons and property. By tracing these pathways in three scientific, legal, and political cultures, we will refine our understanding of the ways in which biology and the law condition and constrain each other's forms of creativity, and the ways in which culturally-specific imaginaries of the relations between these institutions inform modalities of collective sense-making, allocations of responsibility and discourse in the public sphere.