The Socio-Legal Implications of the New Biotechnologies

This review explores a number of legal-theoretical studies of the encounter between law and biotechnology. Rather than attempt an extensive compilation of scholarship, the review focuses on those studies that have addressed the effects that biotechnologies (understood in the broadest sense) have had on the composition of legal form. Although the relation between law and biotechnology is often seen as being one in which law is applied to biotechnology as a kind of prohibitory limit or regulatory force, this review explores some of the ways in which biotechnological programs have challenged and eroded the conceptual form of law. The hypothesis is that there is an antagonistic relation between law and biotechnology and that this antagonism is brought out in scholarship relating to the key areas in which the encounter between law and biotechnology is played out: intellectual property, governance and regulation, and those domains of law that have incorporated technologies of DNA fingerprinting.