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Social and biological phenomena are widely recognized as determinants of human development, health, and socioeconomic attainments across the life course, but our understanding of the underlying pathways and processes remains limited. To address this gap, we define the \"biosocial approach\" as one that conceptualizes the biological and social as mutually constituting, and that draws on models and methods from the biomedical and social/behavioral sciences. By bringing biology into the social sciences, we can illuminate mechanisms through which socioeconomic, psychosocial, and other contextual factors shape human development and health. Human biology is a social biology, and biological measures can therefore identify aspects of social contexts that are harmful, as well as beneficial, with respect to well-being. By bringing social science concepts and study designs to biology and biomedicine, we encourage an epistemological shift that foregrounds social/contextual factors as important determinants of human biology and health. The biosocial approach also underscores the importance of the life course, as assessments of both biological and social features throughout human development over time, and across generations, are needed to achieve a full understanding of social and physical well-being. We conclude with a brief review of the papers in the volume, which showcase the value of a biosocial approach to understanding the pathways linking social stratification, biology, and health across the life course.

Liz, Mary, and Howard are three teenagers in the 1980s. Although unrelated, their families have much in common: stable two- parent households, at least one parent completed high school (though none of them went to college), and all three are white. They differ in one important aspect: their parents command quite different levels of wealth (here measured as net worth, that is, the total sum of financial and real assets minus debt). Liz's parents own less than $700 (inflation adjusted to 2013 dollars), meaning that Liz grows up at the bottom of the wealth distribution. Still, she is far from living in poverty thanks to her parents' annual income of about $50,000. Mary's parents have a somewhat higher income, about $70,000, but also markedly more wealth than Liz's parents: their net worth of roughly $60,000 puts them at about the national median of the time. Also unlike Liz's parents, they are homeowners. Howard is lucky enough to grow up in affluence. Not in terms of income, given that his parents have a household income of only about $40,000, but they have considerable wealth. With a net worth of nearly a quarter million dollars, Howard's parents are in the top 20 percent of wealth holders. They, too, own their home.

Today, the great constitutional conflicts are not only about the state constitution but also about the many constitutions within global society. The battlefields are the global constitution of the finance economy, of science and technology, and of the new digital media. Postmodern society is exposed to expansive, even totalitarian, tendencies of a variety of partial rationalities: monetarization, commodification, scientification, juridification, and medicalization. This is where Michel Foucault's 'capillary power' creeps in from the different disciplines within society, not just from the old 'capital power' of the state. Societal constitutionalism identifies those constitutional moments in politics. One moment was in 1945, when the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was accepted worldwide after the atrocities of totalitarian regimes. In functional differentiation, all subsystems of society develop massive growth energies that are excessively ambiguous in their productivity and in their destructiveness. But constitutional moments also occur in many sites of global society. Adapted from the source document.

Globalization more generally implies interdependency among economies around the world, heightens intensity of competition among a large number of players, fosters multinational trading and investment activities, and increases the prevalence of cross-border transactions. The economic, political, and cultural aspects of globalization have promoted a growing connectedness between different societies and cultures, cultivating an interest in and understanding of global communities and cross-national identities. In other words, globalization refers to the multifaceted and complex processes of worldwide economic, social, cultural, and political expansion and integration, which enable a flow of commodities, commerce, finance, organizations, people, and ideas transnationally across boundaries of cultures, regions, and nation-states. It encompasses growing and dynamic networks of global perceptions, system interdependence, human interaction, and societal transformation, most likely with significant consequences. Extending the focus to global settings provides us with a unique picture that illustrates how women experience and respond to global developments in specific legal markets. The processes of globalization within these transnational and cross-cultural legal settings reveal potential openings and opportunities for women and men. Adapted from the source document.