Law and the Human

What is a human? What makes human life what it is? In the 21st Century, potential answers come from innumerable fields of science, social science, philosophy or religion-above all after recent dramatic advances in biomedicine, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Yet for the vast majority of history, law and legal thought were central to the definition of the human in Western cultures. From Roman Law's definition of the 'person' through to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, law has offered shifting but reliable definitions of the human, in at least three ways: through the normative content of rules, through the juridical conception of political community, subject and government, and through specific interpretative methods that defined the pursuit of justice. Today, all three have been decentred from popular understandings of human life. Yet law remains an important practical force shaping the human institution. From social justice to social networks, from reproductive medicine to moral rights in the age of technical reproduction, by its nature law cannot avoid tracing a human outline in legal language, processes, methodologies, regulations and judgments. As we stand on the cusp of a new technological and potentially "post-human" age, what image of the human emerges from the contemporary legal field? Given the successive challenges to law from (r)evolutions in science, social science and technology, how does law today think the human in new ways?

This question remains relatively under-explored. Recent theoretical scholarship has focused on the "post-human", with legal scholarship also beginning to emphasize the agency of law's materiality. This network asks, instead, how law's notion of the human is impacted by widespread changes in technology, climate, and new orders of global economic and political life. Equally, this network supplements moral and juridical philosophies of the human that have dominated the attention of the legal field, by considering the above pressures placed on law's human by new practices and ways of thinking. The network brings jurisprudential thought into the technological and material turn, whilst retaining its focus on the human as a centrally important question.

Featuring a collaborative workshop, a major conference and a public engagement event, in addition to dissemination via academic outputs, a project website, a presentation to industry, and a university curriculum, this network will facilitate a broad and sustained exchange about how law thinks the human today. It will foreground new ideas about the nature of human life, and enable further, deeper research in this area by uniting academics in interdisciplinary legal studies and bordering disciplines with industry practitioners, cultural industries, and policy developers.

The broader public visibility and implications of the network's activity will also be a central consideration. Public knowledge about the network will be augmented by a website, social media, and print media appearances by the Investigators, as well as a symposium at Tate Modern on "the image of the human" that will incorporate arts practitioners. Direct engagement with the field of practice, particularly law-making and policy development, will be catalysed by a presentation to select All-Party Parliamentary Groups and NGOs. In addition, Advisory Group meetings and network events will explore ways of sparking new dialogues amongst researchers, legal professionals, legislators, and wider publics, to seek new modes of collaboration and potential future research. In this way, AHRC funding for this network will support the initial phase of a larger project with significant potential for further funding possibilities.

The academic exchanges and insights generated in the four network events, along with network findings and outputs, will directly impact on policy developments that network members are part of. We will also seek to precipitate impact in the following constituencies:

All-Party Parliamentary Groups and NGO organisations
We envisage that the seminar organised for policy makers and campaigners, and the ensuing dialogue, will create space for indirect, yet potentially decisive impacts on future policy-making. We also expect the multidisciplinary findings of our research to sustain impact beyond the life of the project.
Invitees would be particularly interested in the network's intellectual insights on law's significant historical role in the normative institution of humanity. We anticipate that these insights will inform and enhance understanding about the function of law in policy-making by increasing and deepening awareness of law beyond its pragmatic use as a tool of social and behavioural engineering. In addition, in drawing together understandings of the law's human, along with those currently emerging in contemporary politics, environmental sciences, and, science and technology studies, the network will produce a more comprehensive understanding of how ideas about human life are conceived in a variety of fields and how they have changed over time. This in turn will likely create a more sustained reflection on the conceptions of human life underlying the political, ethical and social dimensions of the policy areas the invitees work in, and generate more wide-ranging and nuanced policy and legal reform arguments.

Art practitioners/organisers and cultural institutions
The network will have a productive and lasting impact on members working in the creative arts and cultural institutions participating in network activities; notably through the Tate Exchange event, which will focus on the centrality of images and techniques of representation in the production of the human and human life. It will take the form of a sustained intellectual exchange between internationally established scholars and members of the arts community. We anticipate its impact to be considerable, not only in shifting arts practitioners' conceptions of the event's thematic material, but also through informing and influencing participants' subsequent practice. We expect that the strong historical and comparative dimension of the event, by bringing together considerations of techniques of representation in law and in different art media, to increase awareness of the conceptual forms through which legal scholars, art scholars and art practitioners, understand these techniques and the ways in which they are practiced. Furthermore, in staging a dialogue between law's long-established techniques of representing humans and newly dominant contemporary ones, such as those of advertising images, social media, and the 'selfie', the network will facilitate a productive encounter between legal scholars and artists developing creative works of this kind. This will feed back into the network's research to offer alternative ways of seeing law and its techniques.
Overall, although the network will stage this dialogue between art and law on specific themes, we expect its impact to have greater scope; to advance and expand existing discussions on the encounter between art and law, and, in so doing, create conditions for forging alternative ones.

Wider public
The network will stimulate public discourse on topics broadly encapsulated by the term 'law and the human'. We anticipate that dissemination of the network outputs will connect with and stimulate the public's ongoing interest in questions of law and of human life. In so doing, it will generate reflection on the current ways in which law defines the human, and raise awareness of their political significance, thereby building capacity for a more careful appreciation of and meaningful engagement with these issues.