Are Persons Property?: Legal Debates about Property and Personality

Author: Margaret Davies
Published: February 2002
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Limited
ISBN: 0754620328
Hardcover Book
Number of Pages: 220

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Two of Australia's leading feminist legal theorists examine the relationship between persons and property and the concept of self-ownership in relation to current legal debates. What is the legal status of the dead body? What difference does pregnancy make to legal personality? Can human genetic sequences be owned? Does a celebrity own their image? Can the human body and its parts be regarded as a species of property or must human beings, whether dead or alive, whole or dismembered, always be regarded as persons? Is a foetus the property of the mother or a person in its own right? This lucid and original book considers recent legal theory regarding personality and property as well as the historical development of these concepts and illustrates their continuing importance as foundational elements of the legal mind. Author Biography: Margaret Davies, Associate Professor of Law, Flinders University, Australia and Ngaire Naffine, Professor of Law, University of Adelaide, Australia. In a theoretical treatise, law scholars Davies (Flinders U.) and Naffine (Adelaide U.) argue that in a number of important respects, people can still be rendered unfree and effectively reduced to something akin to the property of another in certain situations and under certain conditions. They therefore question the purity of the modern distinction between property and personality. They point out for example that women are particularly susceptible to certain form of commodification, and that modern law commodifies the person at the end of life.

Table of Contents
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Persons as Property: Legal and Philosophical Debates 1
2 From Dominium to 'Thin Air': Concepts of Property 23
3 The Nature of Legal Personality: Its History and its Incidents 51
4 Sex, Reproduction and the Self-Proprietor 75
5 Personality and Property at the End of Life: The Will and the Corpse 99
6 Intellectual Property in the Person 123
7 Owning the Building Blocks of Life 155
8 Persons Beyond Property? 181
Bibliography 187
Index 203

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