Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment ─ Life Beyond the Human

Technologies like CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering, wherein the technical means to modify DNA are cheaper, faster, more accurate, more widely accessible, and with more far-reaching effects than ever before. These cutting-edge technologies raise legal, ethical, cultural, and ecological questions that are so broad and consequential for both human and other-than-human life that they can be difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to directly alter not just a singular form of life but also the genetics of entire species and thus the composition of ecosystems is currently both inadequately regulated and undertheorized. In Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment, distinguished scholars from law, the life sciences, philosophy, environmental studies, science and technology studies, animal health, and religious studies examine what is at stake with these new biotechnologies for life and law, both human and beyond.

Irus Braverman is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. She is author of Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel Palestine (2009), Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012), and Wild Life: The Institution of Nature (2015), and co-editor of The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (2014) and Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities (2016).