In Danish legal theory law and ethics have traditionally been perceived as two distinct concepts belonging to separate spheres. Legal dogmatics has been focusing on "what law is", a question which according to the positivist tradition is supposed to be answered on an empirical rather than a normative basis. Ethics on the other hand has been considered to belong to legal politics whose purpose is to make statements on what law should be. The positivist tradition in Danish legal theory has, however, been challenged more recently, and discussions about the value basis of law and the relation between law and ethics has become more common in many academic legal works.

Irrespective of the development in legal thinking, Danish laws in general are still composed in a rather technical way. Accordingly, it is rare to see acts with provisions specifying the purpose of the act and declaring the basic values sustaining it. However, in the field of biotechnology the legislative attitude has been slightly different. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of ethics in the regulation of the use of biotechnology in the plant area.