Legal constraints on the use of race in biomedical research: toward a social justice framework.

This article addresses three questions concerning the legal regulation of the use of race as a category in biomedical research: how does the law currently encourage the use of race in biomedical research?; how might the existing legal framework constrain its use?; and what should be the law's approach to race-based biomedical research? It proposes a social justice approach that aims to promote racial equality by discouraging the use of "race" as a biological category while encouraging its use as a socio-political category to understand and investigate ways to eliminate disparities in health status, access to health care, and medical treatment.