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.

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.

Issues that are drawn from, and bear on, disciplines including philosophy, law and legal studies, feminist studies, social and political theory, communication studies, critical theory and cultural studies.

Explains why lawyers seeking gender progress from primary legal materials should start with the common law.

The writ of habeas corpus is the principal means by which state prisoners, many on death row, attack the constitutionality of their conviction in federal courts. In The Body and the State, Cary Federman contends that habeas corpus is more than just a get-out-of-jail-free card—it gives death row inmates a constitutional means of overturning a jury's mistaken determination of guilt. Tracing the history of the writ since 1789, Federman examines its influence on federal-state relations and argues that habeas corpus petitions turn legal language upside down, threatening the states' sovereign judgment to convict and execute criminals as well as upsetting the discourse, created by the Supreme Court, that the federal-state relationship ought not be disturbed by convicted criminals making habeas corpus appeals. He pays particular attention to the changes in the discourse over federalism and capital punishment that have restricted the writ's application over time.

Human Rights and the Body is a response to the crisis in human rights, to the very real concern that without a secure foundation for the concept of human rights, their very existence is threatened. While there has been consideration of the discourses of human rights and the way in which the body is written upon, research in linguistics has not yet been fully brought to bear on either human rights or the body. Drawing on legal concepts and aspects of the law of human rights, Mooney aims to provide a universally defensible set of human rights and a foundation, or rather a frame, for them. She argues that the proper frames for human rights are firstly the human body, seen as an index reliant on the natural world, secondly the globe and finally, language. These three frames generate rights to food, water, sleep and shelter, environmental protection and a right against dehumanization. This book is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in the fields of human rights and semiotics of law.