A wide-ranging collection of essays from a leading scholar of legal ethics.

A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.

This book is a rethinking of human dignity in relation to our principles of social governance. The result is a revisionist account of human dignity and law, one focused less on the use of human dignity in our regulations and more on its constitutive implications for the governance of the public realm.

This book reflects on how the concept of human dignity, a central and classical concept in public international law, is used to protect the rights of particularly vulnerable sectors of contemporary society.

"This book reassesses the relationship between human dignity, law and specifically the 'personalist' school of agency. The work argues that a specific way of appreciating dignity is contained in how law understands the person, and so can be used to improve upon how we explain and interpret the law. Despite considerable differences between jurisdictions as regards human dignity in application, it is argued that the particular weight of human persons is the widely shared focal point. The central claim therefore is that the law recognizes, and tries to foster, the status of personhood, and, drawing on the work of Karol Wojtyła, the author develops a 'Status of Personhood Theory'. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Philosophy, Ethics and Political Theory"--

The variety, pace, and power of technological innovations that have emerged in the 21st Century have been breathtaking. These technological developments, which include advances in networked information and communications, biotechnology, neurotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, and environmental engineering technology, have raised a number of vital and complex questions. Although these technologies have the potential to generate positive transformation and help address 'grand societal challenges', the novelty associated with technological innovation has also been accompanied by anxieties about their risks and destabilizing effects. Is there a potential harm to human health or the environment? What are the ethical implications? Do this innovations erode of antagonize values such as human dignity, privacy, democracy, or other norms underpinning existing bodies of law and regulation? These technological developments have therefore spawned a nascent but growing body of 'law and technology' scholarship, broadly concerned with exploring the legal, social and ethical dimensions of technological innovation. This handbook collates the many and varied strands of this scholarship, focusing broadly across a range of new and emerging technology and a vast array of social and policy sectors, through which leading scholars in the field interrogate the interfaces between law, emerging technology, and regulation. Structured in five parts, the handbook (I) establishes the collection of essays within existing scholarship concerned with law and technology as well as regulatory governance; (II) explores the relationship between technology development by focusing on core concepts and values which technological developments implicate; (III) studies the challenges for law in responding to the emergence of new technologies, examining how legal norms, doctrine and institutions have been shaped, challenged and destabilized by technology, and even how technologies have been shaped by legal regimes; (IV) provides a critical exploration of the implications of technological innovation, examining the ways in which technological innovation has generated challenges for regulators in the governance of technological development, and the implications of employing new technologies as an instrument of regulatory governance; (V) explores various interfaces between law, regulatory governance, and new technologies across a range of key social domains.

This essay reviews David Luban's forthcoming book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity. At the heart of this new book is an argument that interactions between lawyers and clients ought to be at the center of jurisprudential inquiry. Pointing out that most cases do not go to trial and that much transactional work occurs outside the litigation context, he argues that law's defining moments occur when a quot;client sketches out a problem and a lawyer tenders advice,quot; rather than when a judge decides a litigant's case. This review essay examines how Luban might elaborate a new quot;jurisprudence of lawyeringquot; by examining the unresolved tension that has always existed between the strong deference to client values in his writing on lawyer paternalism and the quot;moral activistquot; vision of lawyering that he has proposed in response to the problem of overzealous partisanship. The human dignity framework he introduces in this volume holds out the promise of integrating respect for client values with attention to the public good. However, I argue, to fulfill this promise would require Luban to move away from the perspective of lawyers as quot;lawmakersquot; that he highlights as a jurisprudence of lawyering and contemplate the value and legitimacy of lawyers' partisan interpretation of the law in transactional as well as litigation settings.