Abstract

This is a collection of essays which is focused towards showing that the experience of health is shaped by law and medical regulation and that health is part of our shared subjectivities. We try to show that law and legal concepts have a powerful role to play in regulation, while at times being indistinguishable from other practices of regulation offered by accountants, economists and medical scientists. To that end, the collection opens with two essays on the relationship between ethics and law, one centered on the concept of the tragic body in Kantian autonomy and one centred on the Lockian conception of ownership of the body as a self-referential property right. The issue of health is then explored along with issues of sexuality isn three essays, each offering a comparative analysis, on the regulation of embryo and infertility research in the United Kingdom and Denmark, the treatment of HIV positive prisoners in the United Kingdom and United States, and the regulation of non-consensual sterilization in the United Kingdom and Germany.