Science, Law, and the Body. Looking for Individual Agency and Responsability

Abstract

In Egypt, most criminal cases are investigated on the basis of forensic medicine reports. To a lesser extent, personal status and civil cases are also referred to forensic doctors. In this type of documents, doctors provide the judge who mandated them with bodily and pathological descriptions. Classically, forensic medicine investigated various issues ranging from causes of death to psychological pathologies and used different techniques, among which fingerprinting is the most famous. With the progress of biology and genetics, new techniques like DNA profiling of samples found on the crime scene were introduced. Although endowed with discretionary powers, judges tend to ground their rulings on such reports that provide them with bodily and pathological descriptions of actions and people. Technically, these descriptions are supposed to be disengaged instruments in the hands of neutral judges. Practically, forensic reports are highly implicative and consequential, both morally and legally. In this paper, I proceed in five stages. First, I briefly discuss what can be considered as the “missing-what” of both legal and anthropological studies, which leads to better take into consideration the constraints and resources of practical legal work. Second, I review the notions of legal personality, capacity and responsibility in Egyptian criminal law, including the law concerning medical practice, showing that these textual references constitute the resources and the constraints with which participants in legal proceedings must deal. Third, I show how law on the books works for all practical legal purposes, that is, how it works as a practical tool in the hands of practitioners. Finally, I look at the details of forensic reports issued in two Egyptian cases in order to show how they are practically constituted and orient to the ascription of material causes and individual agencies to facts. By so doing, I shall describe how these documents come to play an active role in the grammar of legal responsibility, which is based in most modern legal systems on a relationship between a deed, a person and a link of causality between the former and the latter.