This edited collection is the result of an international workshop Brave
New Law! Legal Personhood in the New Biosciences, which was held
in late August 2018, at the University of Sydney and organized by
the Biopolitics of Science Research Network. The workshop brought
together 33 scholars from around the world to discuss changes in and
transformations of legal personhood considering recent bioscientific
developments. The premise of the workshop was that complex issues
were emerging in the intersection of law and biology, an area of law
that was quickly expanding and displaying highly composite problems
that challenge existing legal regimes. Key questions included: What do
the new biosciences do to our social, cultural, and legal conceptions of
personhood? How does our legal apparatus incorporate new legitimations
from the emerging biosciences into their knowledge systems? And
what kind of ethical, socio-political, but also scientific consequences
are attached to the establishment of such new legalities? By bringing
together legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, cultural
theorists, and political philosophers, the aim of the workshop was to
examine these problems by looking at materialities, the posthuman, and
the relational in the (un)making of legalities, but also to critically assess
the “newness” of these legalities, and to compare them with earlier investigations
of natural personhood.