138 research outputs found
Fabricating persons and things
No full textThis collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things
Book review: Marilyn Strathern: “a truly inspirational and trailblazing anthropologist”
No full textThis recent collection of original and accessible essays on the work of Marilyn Strathern represents an accessible introduction to the work of one of the world’s leading anthropologists. Alain Pottage reflects on what this means for knowledge production and the ‘impact’ of scholarship. Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science. Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrović-Šteger (eds), Cambridge University Press. September 2011. 206 pp
Law Interrupted? Latour Snooping around Le Conseil d’Etat
No full textReview of: Bruno Latour (2010 [2002]) The Making of Law. Translated by Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage. Revised by the author. Cambridge: Polity Press, 297 p.Review of: Bruno Latour (2010 [2002]) The Making of Law. Translated by Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage. Revised by the author. Cambridge: Polity Press, 297 p
Dignity again
No full textTwo recent contributions to this journal discuss a challenge to Stanford's time-lapse embryo monitoring patent, currently before the European Patent Office (EPO). Sterckx, Cockbain and Pennings (2017) would like to keep the morphokinetics of embryo division in the public domain; they argue that time-lapse monitoring (TLM) is a diagnostic method in the sense of European patent law and therefore unpatentable. In response, Pearce (2017) suggests that the jurisprudence of the EPO unambiguously says that TLM is not a diagnostic method. This commentary proposes an alternative legal ground for challenging patents relating to the principle of TLM, a ground that could be invoked before national courts and, ultimately, the Court of Justice of the European Union: TLM is not a diagnostic procedure but a process of selection that breaches the criterion of dignity in European patent law
Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law
No full textAnthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of ‘law and society’, or ‘law in context’. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on ‘law itself’, on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technicalities’ of law. How might the legal scholar be inspired by this approach? In this article, I explore one possible way of approaching law after anthropology, which is to find within law’s own archive a set of resources for an analogous representation of law itself. Drawing on the historical scholarship of Yan Thomas, I suggest that the Roman conception of law as object offers an engaging counterpart to the anthropological take on law as a specific set of tools or, technicalities, or as a particular art of making relations
Fabled Animals
No full textReview of Michel Serres (translated by Lawrence R. Schehr) The parasite. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp. xxviii þ 255. (All page references are to the French edition of Le parasite. Paris: Hachette, 1997.
Law machines: Scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law
No full text Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted. A model could be set on a table, pointed at, picked up, rotated or upended so as to display a point of interest to a particular audience within the courtroom, and, crucially, set in motion to reveal the ‘mode of operation’ of a machine. The immediate object of demonstration was to distinguish the intangible invention from its tangible embodiment, but models also ‘machined’ patent law itself. Demonstrations of patent claims with models articulated and resolved a set of conceptual tensions that still make the definition and apprehension of the invention difficult, even today, but they resolved these tensions in the register of materiality, performativity and visibility, rather than the register of conceptuality. The story of models tells us something about how inventions emerge and subsist within the context of patent litigation and patent doctrine, and it offers a starting point for renewed reflection on the question of how technology becomes property. </jats:p
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