The Embodiment of Law and Law of the Body. The Body as Law Phenomenon

The article is devoted to the reasoning of the body as a legal phenomenon. After all, although the body is ontologically the closest thing to us, from the legal point of view it is one of the most mysterious legal phenomena. Thus, traditional jurisprudence usually divides all legal beings into subjects of law (the state, individuals and legal entities, the nation, etc.) and objects of legal relations (estate, material evidence, objects of dispute, etc.). However, the body cannot be identified within these criteria. On the one hand, the body itself is not a subject of law. After all, purely disembodied, abstract entities, such as legal entities or the state, are subjects of law, sometimes without any material “embodiment”. On the other hand, purely corporeal existence does not guarantee legal personality, since, for example, the presence of a dead body in itself indicates its absence. This state of affairs is fully reflected in the national legislation of Ukraine. Its analysis shows that the human body is not defined as an independent object of legal regulation, and there is no corresponding legal regime. The most symptomatic manifestation of the total disregard for the legal issues of the body is the absence of a corresponding term even in special medical legislation regulating organ transplantation, health care, and medical assistance. Therefore, the phenomenon of the body currently remains outside the attention of Ukrainian lawyers. This leads to the lack of conceptual reasoning of the body as a legal phenomenon and uncertainty of legal regulation of the human body as such. So, it can be stated that the phenomenon of the body needs to be comprehended from a philosophical and legal point of view. The result of such comprehension is the identification of the following ontological features of the body as a legal phenomenon: syncretism, liminality and intentionality of the body. This, in turn, gives grounds to assert that normativity is immanently present in the body, when the body itself is a hypothesis and disposition for others, and the impossibility of communication with it is a sanction. As a result, the author concludes that the inviolability of the body should be enshrined in law and the relevant amendments should be made to the Civil and Criminal Codes of Ukraine.