Matthew Saleh (Cornell University), Hannah Potter, & Kendall Foley (Cornell University) have posted Law's Body (Mercer Law Review Vol. 74, No. 3, 2023) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
How do law’s narratives construct one of its central objects: the human body? This essay explores legal constructions of the human body: both in its idealized form, and in the negative ontological spaces of injury, disability, death, and dehumanization that surround that ideal.
And from the paper:
THE BODY exists in law as a multidimensional construct of layered meanings. The legal dimensions wherein material bodies are constructed might include polarities or spectrums like: healthy or unhealthy, abled or disabled, safe or unsafe, private or un-private, innocent or guilty, free or unfree, equal or unequal.
And further on:
Accordingly, one of the few relatively clear distinctions the law draws in its constructions of THE BODY is the difference between a living and nonliving one. A threshold rule of construction, or truism, is thus:
A living body is legally distinct from a nonliving one.
Let’s call this the Animate rule. The law mostly succeeds in distinguishing an animate body from a corpse. It also mostly distinguishes a completely hypothetical birth from one where an organism in a state of fetal bodily development exists. Yet, even in this simplest of rules, THE BODY’s peculiar, nonliteral status is apparent. It exists as a material object before-and-after it is legally alive. It has a transitive quality. The legal person passes through it.
A very interesting paper. Recommended.