Liminality and the Law: Interrogating Jurisprudence Throughout the Liminal Life Cycle

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Legal frameworks tend to rely on the objects of regulation fitting within bounded categories to function effectively. This siloed approach extends to health law, where legal analyses directed towards the human body often situate individualswithin binary constructions, such as persons or property. Though pragmatic, this approach is insufficiently reflexive of the lived and embodied experiences of many actors. Legal persons regularly occupy the spaces 'in-between', existing asliminal entities. This research project encourages law to be informed by liminality. By expressly considering liminality when designing regulatory architecture, legal rules might better reflect the persons they govern, and liminality would berefined as a tool for critical legal analysis. These ends are of equal and growing importance. As biotechnological developments accelerate, they have set humankind on a trajectory which heads towards the human body (and what it means to be 'human') becoming more fragmented, complex, and liminal. This problem of human lives no longer fitting into neat legal categories is set to become exacerbated as new medical interventions reshape our ways of conceiving,being born, growing, aging, and dying. Technology has the capacity to remake the human, and consequently the borders of human existence have become imprecise at best, and contested at worst. If the boundaries are to be inevitablypushed and blurred, we must develop sufficient and appropriate tools to respond.