Daniela Carpi

Bioethics and Biolaw through Literature

In todays world, the increasing progress in biotechnologies has paved the way for profound challenges to basic notions definingthe human existence. Paramount concepts, such as autonomy, dignity and the very assumption of human finitude, need to be reframed in the light of unprecedented innovations and possibilities. The multidisciplinary encounter of literature, bioethics and biolaw offers the opportunity to investigate the impacts on human life stemming from scientific potentialities and pretensions. The aim of this book is to merge the two fields of bioethics and law (or biolaw) through the literary text, by taking into consideration the transformations of the concept of persona at which we have nowadays arrived.

The garden as the law in the Renaissance: a nature metaphor in a legal setting

Abstract Among the many visual images we use for the law the garden is an outstanding one. The topos of the garden has a wide semantic range: it is the eternal metaphor of life and it is an ethical image indicating the active behavioral rules man has to follow. The myth of the garden arises connected to a structural system put at man’s disposal, however a system which entails limits and limitations. The action of shaping nature is connected with a sort of violence imposed on nature: the garden becomes man’s grand scenario where man challenges God in his ambition to modify and regulate nature. In the case of both garden and law a creation according to certain rules is implied and these rules must be respected unless the garden and the juridical system wither and die. I here explore the relationship between the concept of garden/landscape through which law is conceived and from which it draws meaning.

Hermes: God of Thieves. Plagiarism in Twentieth Century Literature

The question of imitation moves from an open and obvious phase, the phase of Classicism, during which the models from antiquity were imitated with pride and with a conscious desire to set fixed and codified models for compositions, following norms for distinction in well-defined genres, to the period of Romanticism, during which the concept of the works uniqueness predominated, and the work was seen as the link between God and the world. During the twentieth century the attitude towards plagiarism changed again: in our century the question of artistic originality becomes anxiety-provoking and the relationship with tradition becomes competitive. The heavy weight of tradition creates in the writer a desire to exorcise in some way the fear of the death of creative originality and gives rise to the playful, demystifying re-presentation of previous works, in an attempt to desecrate genres and precursors, re-creating them overtly and covertly at the same time. Thus plagiarism transforms itself into a new creative force, in which tradition is no longer imitated in a subservient, nor a reverential fashion, nor in the sense of the subdivision of pre-established genres. Plagiarism becomes instead a challenge on the same grounds of the canonical authors, demonstrating in this manner a strong capacity to capture the essence of the authors own language (a link to the new emphasis on the act of reading).

How to Enforce the Law: Video-Shocks for Road Security

Abstract In the contemporary world the law must use images to enforce our compliance: the law needs some enforcement in the form of visual help. Why then does the law have to rely on advertising in order to have its voice heard? What impact does advertising have on the legal profession?

Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film

Abstract My starting point is that bioethics and the problems connected to human rights and human dignity are the logical evolution of the principles of equity. My paper aims at analysing Jodi Picoult’s novel My Sister’s Keeper (2005) in the light of the connections existing between Literature and the interdisciplinary fields of Bioethics and Biolaw. Bioethics examines the moral and ethical dimension of biological sciences, with particular reference to health-related contexts, whereas biolaw takes into account their more and more evident legal implications. Picoult’s literary production is chiefly devoted to inspect how modern technology applied to medicine has affected our lives, bringing on evident threats to the consistency of our rights and undermining our interpersonal relationships as well. Throughout this compelling novel, life, love and compassion, science and the law indissolubly merge together. The extremely complicated context of boundary medical situations the author presents force us to open our eyes to alarming current scenarios, and to their future possible developments as well. Her fictional characters call for a reassessment of the concept of human dignity and for the necessity for law to defend the integrity of the body.

Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture

In the by-now well assessed comparison between law and literature, we may say that both fields are brought up inside powerful systems of value which are inevitable and ideological. Literature and law rely on the values and habits that culture ratifies. The “cultural turn,” which started in the 1980s with the Cultural Studies movement, also involved law: law and legal practices became objects of interest to be explained by cultural factors.1 Friedman, one of the first philosophers to debate on this topic, asserted that legal culture and even individual judicial decisions exist only through reference to customs, values, ways of thought, and behaviors of the society at large.2 The question is how cultural concerns shape the law and, vice versa, how the law influences cultural schemas embedded in institutions. In this comparison critics have adopted a division similar to the one between law and literature: “law as culture,” “law in culture,” and “legal culture.” The first one views law as the product of a nation’s culture; the second one considers law as participating in the creation of a nation’s culture; the third one purports that law has its own and distinct cultural system: “Legal culture and consciousness are terms used to emphasize analytically ways in which formal legal institutions and everyday social relations intersect and share cognitive resources.”3 In the “Law-as-culture” and “Law-in-culture” model, legality is conceptualized as an interpretive cultural framework through which individuals come to

The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense

Abstract The ruins that appear in Piranesis engravings can be seen as the metaphor for a social system which has disappeared but remains visible in its ruins. On these ruins a new system is erected which must take into account past tradition. You never build in a vacuum, even in law, but everything evolves. It is also Burkes idea in Reflections on the Revolution in France, where he criticizes the fact that the French have done away with their past instead of constructing and bringing about reforms from within a well assessed system. The ruins may epitomize the Roman juridical system upon which all subsequent juridical systems have been rooted. The Justinian code has been the basis for all systems, also for the Anglo-Saxon one, even if in the course of time the latter has distanced itself from the Roman system. This symbolic passage from times past to modern times is metaphorized by the Gothic picturesque garden, which plays with a taste for ruins, with the sublime sense of delight, so as to bring about a re-empowerment of a new juridical system.

DIRITTO E RELIGIONE: ESEMPI DAL ROMANZO GOTICO INGLESE

The essay highlights the mutual interaction of Law and Religion. Instead of embracing the secular separation between these two domains, the Author focuses her attention on the elements which Law shares with Religion. In particular, Law and Religion: a) are based on a complex system of prescriptions and prohibitions; b) keep and guard an inner sense of mystery and inaccessibility; c) are communicated through a bulk of symbols and rituals; d) mark a tension towards transcendence. The general arguments, discussed on a theoretical and epistemological level, are therefore analyzed and discussed with reference to English Gothic novels, such as Vathek by W. Beckford and Melmoth the Wanderer by C. Maturin.

A Biojuridical Reading of Dracula

Abstract A large part of Bram Stokers novel Dracula focuses on the intricacies of property relations, that is the social, legal and personal stakes of ownership. Property rights are thematized vis-à-vis human rights. In the novel the notion of personal property and the idea of subjectivity are intertwined. The evolution of Draculas identity in the course of the novel moves from that of the wanderer, given his condition of undead, rooted in a place outside history and time (the castle, the snowy wilderness) to that of new capitalistic man, well rooted in civilized society thanks to his acquisition of a mansion. Dracula tries to become part of Western civilization through his possessions and by acquiring a settled position. It is a symbolic sense of geography and possession that epitomizes Draculas attempt at existing as a legal persona. This also entails the inclusion of a new type of legal identity within the western racial corpus. The right to property is deeply felt by the whole of mankind and considered as intrinsic in the individuals self-identification. The aim of my paper is that of analysing the various functions of property in the novel in the creation of an independent individual.

Equity: Assessing the Results of a Project

A discussion on ethical and legal problems, both reflecting and stimulating juridical culture, acting as a mirror image of the juridical issues and discourses of the times is presented. The article through various philosophers and playwrights proposes that equity is rooted in the intelligence of the human individual and ethics is relationship of man with his desire for a good life.