French jurisprudence on the contamination of blood products: a clarification of the legal perception of human blood

Abstract

Does the silence of the law, and principally civil law, about blood come from the disembodied, spiritualist nature of our law which only sees in a person, the subject of law, the expression of a will? Another face of this same logic is: blood would seem to be absent from the law because it is totally incarnate and because as it circulates, so to speak, in camera, it does not of itself come into legal circulation. It seems to be, de facto, “extra-commercium”.
After a long inability to name and qualify blood (I), the law, through the jurisprudence brought about by the contamination of blood destined for transfusions, has broken down the taboo, and admitted that the blood provided is a thing, and even a good (II).