Biolaw: Origins, Doctrine and Juridical Applications on the Biosciences


Book Description

This book configures a consistent epistemology of biolaw that distinguishes itself from bioethics and from a mere set of international instruments on the regulation of biomedical practices. Such orthodox intellection has prevented biolaw from being understood as a new branch of law with legally binding force, which has certainly dwindled its epistemological density. Hence, this is a revolutionary book as it seeks to deconstruct the history of biolaw and its oblique epistemologies, which means not accepting perennial axioms, and not seeing paradigms where only anachronism and anomaly still exist. It is a book aimed at validity, but also at solidity because the truth of biolaw has never been told before. In that sense, it is also a revealing text. The book shapes biolaw as an independent and compelling branch of law, with a legally binding scope, which boosts the effectiveness of new deliberative models for legal sciences, as well as it utterly reinforces hermeneutical and epistemological approaches, in tune with the complexity of disturbing legal scenarios created by biomedical sciences’ latest applications. This work adeptly addresses the origins of the European biolaw and its connections with American bioethics. It also analyses different biolaw’s epistemologies historically developed both in Europe and in the United States, to finally offer a new conception of biolaw as a new branch of law, by exploring its theoretical and practical atmospheres to avoid muddle and uncertainty when applied in biomedical settings. This book is suitable for academics and students of biolaw, law, bioethics, and biomedical research, as well as for professionals in higher education institutions, courts, the biomedical industry, and pharmacological companies.







Dictionary of Global Bioethics


Book Description

This Dictionary presents a broad range of topics relevant in present-day global bioethics. With more than 500 entries, this dictionary covers organizations working in the field of global bioethics, international documents concerning bioethics, personalities that have played a role in the development of global bioethics, as well as specific topics in the field.The book is not only useful for students and professionals in global health activities, but can also serve as a basic tool that explains relevant ethical notions and terms. The dictionary furthers the ideals of cosmopolitanism: solidarity, equality, respect for difference and concern with what human beings- and specifically patients - have in common, regardless of their backgrounds, hometowns, religions, gender, etc. Global problems such as pandemic diseases, disasters, lack of care and medication, homelessness and displacement call for global responses.This book demonstrates that a moral vision of global health is necessary and it helps to quickly understand the basic ideas of global bioethics.




International Biolaw and Shared Ethical Principles


Book Description

This book provides an overview of the ethical and legal developments which have occurred in bioethics and human rights. The work analyzes the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights from an ethical and legal perspective, commenting on its implementation and discussing the role of non-binding norms in international bioethics.




Self-Determination, Dignity and End-of-Life Care


Book Description

This volume gathers the contributions of leading researchers in the fields of bioethics, medical law and human rights. By providing an interdisciplinary reading of advance directives regulation against the background of European and International law, this book aims to offer new insights into the most controversial legal issues surrounding the theme of dignity and autonomy at the end of life. Cross-cultural perspectives from Europe, the Americas, Australia and China offer a comparative analysis of legal approaches to end-of-life decision-making and care, including the hotly debated issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide, also giving an account of recent developments in domestic legislation and jurisprudence. Special focus is placed on the Italian legal system and its ongoing discussion on advance directives regulation.




Humanity across International Law and Biolaw


Book Description

An examination of how the concept of humanity is mobilized to make legal arguments in different areas of law.




Handbook of Human Dignity in Europe


Book Description

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the legal concept and the meaning of human dignity for each European state and the European Union. For each of these 43 countries and the EU, it scrutinizes three main aspects: the constitution, legislation, and application of law (court rulings). The book addresses and presents answers to important questions relating to the concept of human dignity. These questions include the following: What is the meaning of human dignity? What is the legal status of the respective human dignity norms? Are human dignity norms of a programmatic nature, or do they establish an individual right which can be invoked before court? Is human dignity inviolable? The volume answers these questions from the perspectives of all European countries. As a reaction to the barbaric events during World War II, human dignity (dignitas) found its way into international law. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The starting point for developing the concept on a national level was the codification of human dignity in article 1, paragraph 1 of the German Grundgesetz. Consequently, the concept of human dignity spread throughout Europe and, in the context of human rights, became a fundamental legal concept.




Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility


Book Description

A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.




Principles of international biolaw


Book Description

Rapid advances in genetics and medicine present both opportunities and threats to the advancement of human rights and public health in this era of globalization. While such advances contribute significantly to progress against disease, they may also pose profound global public policy concerns in that the ethical and policy considerations that follow from scientific advances lag far behind. In this context, the aim of this book is to present the current global efforts to develop common principles relating to biomedicine. Section I sets forth the pivotal role that the principle of human dignity plays in this domain, and identifies a number of other principles that can be drawn from the recent international policy documents on bioethics. Section II provides detailed commentaries on recent international instruments relating to biomedicine adopted by UNESCO and the Council of Europe. Section III elaborates upon specific biomedical human rights issues that are the subject of contemporary international standard-setting efforts, including biomedical research, population biobanks, genetic testing, and advance directives. Essays in each of these sections examine the extent to which promoting and protecting human rights has created a common framework for contemporary international lawmaking in the field of biomedicine and the strengths and limitations of international law as a tool for advancing biomedical human rights.




Dictionary of Statuses within EU Law


Book Description

This Dictionary analyses the ways in which the statuses of European citizens are profoundly affected by EU law. The study of one’s particular status (as a worker, consumer, family member, citizen, etc.) helps to reconsider the legal notions concerning an individual’s status at the EU level. The Dictionary includes a foreword by Evgeni Tanchev, Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union, which illustrates some interesting features of the Court’s case law on statuses.The Dictionary’s core is composed of 79 chapters, published in alphabetical order. Each brief chapter analyses how the individual status was conditioned or created by contemporary EU law, or how the process of European integration modified the traditional juridical definition of the respective status. The Dictionary provides answers to the following questions: Has the process of European integration modified the traditional juridical definition of individual status? Has the concept of legal status now acquired a new function? What role has EU law played in developing a new modern function for the concept of individual status? Are the selection of a specific individual status by EU law and the proliferation of such statuses, which is synonymous with the creation of new privileges, collectively undermining the goal of achieving substantive equality between EU citizens? Does this constitute a return to the past? Under EU law, is it possible to create a uniform definition of the legal status of the person, over and above the definition that is provided by a given Member State’s legal system?