The law only regards corporeal persons as human beings

Abstract

The special status generally bestowed upon the human body has long had a legal dimension as well. And the specifically legal issues remained constant for a long time, which probably explains why Germany’s Basic Law and Civil Code contain no more than rudimentary regulations. Since the cultural justifications behind these rules are all but lost the darkness of legal history, the challenges posed by rapid developments in medicine, biology, and pharmacology in recent decades have been met in Germany with a profusion of scattered clauses and doctrines, leaving the main codifications unchanged. This is in stark contrast to the People’s Republic of China’s new Civil Code, which, in the second chapter of Book 4, on personality rights, provides a unified – and by international standards, modern – set of rules to address legal issues pertaining to the body. The differences between the regulatory models now in place in either country warrant the present comparison.