"This interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between conceptions of nature and (largely American) legal thought and practice. It focuses on the politics and pragmatics of nature talk as expressed in both extralegal disputes and their transformation and translation into forms of legal discourse (tort, property, contract, administrative law, criminal law, and constitutional law). The set consists of a series of contexts and cases organized around a conventional distinction between 'external' and 'internal' nature: forces of nature, endangered species, animal experiments, bestiality, reproductive technologies, genetic screening, biological defenses in criminal cases, and involuntary medication of inmates. He demonstrates throughout that nearly any construal of 'nature' entails an interpretation of what it is to be (distinctively) human"--BOOK JACKET.