What\u27s in a Name? Law\u27s Identity Under the Tort of Appropriation

This article is divided into three parts. In Part I, the article explores the notion that under the tort of appropriation, a person’s name is understood to implicate critical aspects of her identity. This notion is explored in relation to specific historical cases raising the issues of whether a woman who adopts her husband’s name has a property right in that name and whether a person who adopts a professional or stage name has separate rights in that name apart from his legal name. Second, Part II focuses on a person’s right to maintain the integrity of his physical image. Finally, Part III examines one interest in his or her “aural image.” The paper concludes with the observation that the courts are capable of accommodating society’s flexible notions of identity, albeit in an occasionally non-democratic fashion

How a Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’: Law, Commerce, and the Production of Racial Categories in Medicine

A drug called BiDil is poised to become the first drug ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat heart failure in African Americans - and only African Americans. This article explores the story of BiDil and considers some of its broader implications for the use of racial categories in law, medicine, and science. It argues that BiDil is an ethnic drug today as much, if not more because of the interventions of law and commerce as because of any biomedical considerations. The article is, first, a retrospective analysis of how law, commerce, science, and medicine interacted to produce a distinctive understanding of BiDil as an ethnic drug, shaping which questions got asked at critical junctures in its development and orienting how they were pursued. Second, it is a prospective consideration of how the science and medicine thus produced may come to affect legal and commercial understandings of the significance of race in relation to biology. The development of BiDil has profound implications for health law and policy, first, because it may be distorting current efforts to address the very real health problems associated with heart failure in America; and second because it implicates federal agencies in inappropriately giving the imprimatur of the state to conceiving and using race as a biological category

Biotechnology and the Legal Constitution of the Self: Managing Identity in Science, the Market, and Society

This article considers how certain ideas underlying the tort of appropriation may enable use more effectively to deal with the problems presented by a case such Moore v. Regents of the University of California which dealt with property rights of Moore’s spleen cells. First, the author explores how the tort of appropriation of identity opens up new approaches to inform and perhaps supplement principles of property law as a guide to managing genetic information or other materials that seem intimately bound up with a particular human subject. Secondly, the author analyzes how the various opinions produced by the Supreme Court implicitly elaborate a powerful and problematic relation between the spheres of private life, science and the market, such that the science is granted special status and power relative to the other two – or rather, how the Supreme Court effectively exploits the social status of science to expand the reach of the market into the private sphere of control over the body. Finally, the author considers how the Appellate Court’s discussion of appropriation of identity suggests possible new avenues to pursue regarding the legal recognition and management of both individual and group identity

Privatizing Biomedical Citizenship: Risk, Duty, and Potential in the Circle of Pharmaceutical Life

Genomic research is at an impasse. In the decade since the completion of the first draft of the human genome, progress has been made, but few of the grandest promises of genomics have materialized. Biomedical researchers largely agree that one critical thing is essential to propel genomics into the future and maintain its legitimacy: more bodies. This Article will examine recent efforts at massive recruitment of subjects to participate in biomedical research and will argue that such efforts, while clearly motivated by a desire to drive biomedical research to its next stage of promised critical breakthroughs, also promote a privatized conception of citizenship that configures citizens’ duties as serving the public good primarily through serving the good of private corporations—pharmaceutical manufacturers in particular. This reconfiguration of citizenship, in turn, implicates the allocation of related public resources to support drug development

How a Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’: Law, Commerce, and the Production of Racial Categories in Medicine

A drug called BiDil is poised to become the first drug ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat heart failure in African Americans - and only African Americans. This article explores the story of BiDil and considers some of its broader implications for the use of racial categories in law, medicine, and science. It argues that BiDil is an ethnic drug today as much, if not more because of the interventions of law and commerce as because of any biomedical considerations. The article is, first, a retrospective analysis of how law, commerce, science, and medicine interacted to produce a distinctive understanding of BiDil as an ethnic drug, shaping which questions got asked at critical junctures in its development and orienting how they were pursued. Second, it is a prospective consideration of how the science and medicine thus produced may come to affect legal and commercial understandings of the significance of race in relation to biology. The development of BiDil has profound implications for health law and policy, first, because it may be distorting current efforts to address the very real health problems associated with heart failure in America; and second because it implicates federal agencies in inappropriately giving the imprimatur of the state to conceiving and using race as a biological category