This book brings together a range of theoretical perspectives to consider fundamental questions of health law and the place of the body within it. Health, and more recently health law, has long been animated by discussions of particular bodies - whether they are disordered, diseased, or disabled - but each of these classificatory regimes claim some knowledge about the body. This edited collection aims to uncover and challenge the fundamental assumptions that underpin medico-legal knowledge claims about such bodies. This exploration is achieved through a mix of perspectives, but many contributors look towards embodiment as a perspective that understands bodies to be shaped by their institutional contexts. Much of this work alerts us to the idea that medical practitioners not only respond to healthcare issues, but also create them through their own understandings of normality and fixing. Bodies, as a result, cannot be understood outside of, or as separate to, their medical and legal contexts. This compelling book pushes the possibility of new directions in health care and health justice.
Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
1. Nobody, Anybody, Somebody, Everybody: A Jurisprudence of the Body,
Chris Dietz, Mitchell Travis, and Michael Thomson.- Part I The Body of Health
Law.-
2. Reasoning from the Body: Universal Vulnerability and Social Justice,
Martha Albertson Fineman.-
3. Studying Public Health Law: Principles,
Politics, and Populations as Patients, John Coggan.-
4. Bioinequalities:
Rethinking Legal Responses to the Biological and Intergenerational Harm
Caused by Inequality, Karen OConnell and Isabel Karpin.-
5. Healthcare,
Well-being, and the Regulation of Diversity in Healing, Emilie Cloatre and
Nayeli Urquiza-Haas.- Part II Bodies of Health.-
6. Temporal Bodies:
Emergencies, Emergence, and Intersex Embodiment, Fae Garland and Mitchell
Travis.-
7. Death Before Birth: Liminal Bodies and Legal Frameworks, Karolina
Kuberska, Danielle Fuller, Jeannette Littlemore, Sheelagh
McGuinness, and Sarah Turner.-
8. Depathologising Gender: Vulnerability in
Trans Health Law, Chris Dietz and Ruth Pearce.-
9. Feminist Activism in the
Context of Clinical Trials and Drug Roll-Out, Aziza Ahmed.- Part III
Reframing Health Law Through Bodies.-
10. Establishing Boundaries for
Speculation About Artificial Wombs, Ectogenesis, Gender and the Gestating
Body, Claire Horn and Elizabeth Chloe Romanis.-
11. A Relational
Responsibilities Framework for Childrens Healthcare Law, Jo Bridgeman.-
12.
Embodied Integrity, Shaping Surgeries, and the Profoundly Disabled Child,
Marie Fox, Michael Thomson, and Joshua Warburton.
Chris Dietz is Lecturer in Law and Social Justice at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. Mitchell Travis is Lecturer in Law and Social Justice and Deputy Director for the Centre of Law and Social Justice, in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, UK. Michael Thomson is Director of the School of Law's Centre for Law and Social Justice, University of Leeds, UK, where he is also a Chair in Health Law.
