The Law And The Dead

The fate of the dead is a compelling and emotive subject, which also raises increasingly complex legal questions. This book focuses on the substantive laws around disposal of the recently deceased and associated issues around their post-mortem fate. It looks primarily at the laws in England and Wales but also offers a comparative approach, drawing heavily on material from other common law jurisdictions including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The book provides an in-depth, contextual and comparative analysis of the substantive laws and policy issues around corpse disposal, exhumation and the posthumous treatment of the dead, including commemoration. Topics covered include: the legal frameworks around burial, cremation and other disposal methods; the hierarchy of persons who have a legal duty to dispose of the dead and who are entitled to possession of the deceased’s remains; offences against the dead; family burial disputes, and the legal status of burial instructions; the posthumous use of donated bodily material; and the rules around disinterment, and creating an appropriate memorial. A key theme of the book will be to look at the manner in which conflicts involving the dead are becoming increasingly common in secular, multi-cultural societies where the traditional nuclear family model is no longer the norm, and how such legal contests are resolved by courts. As the first comprehensive survey of the laws in this area for decades, this book will be of use to academics, lawyers and judges adjudicating on issues around the fate of the dead, as well as the death industry and funeral service providers.

The governance of the dead in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to a new arrangement of thanato-politics in the West. Legal, medical and bureaucratic institutions developed innovative technologies for managing the dead, maximising their efficacy and exploiting their vitality. Law and the Dead writes a history of their institutional life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With a particular focus on the technologies of the death investigation process, including place-making, the forensic gaze, bureaucratic manuals, record-keeping and radiography, this book examines how the dead came to be incorporated into legal institutions in the modern era. Drawing on the writings of philosophers, historians and legal theorists, it offers tools for thinking through how the dead dwell in law, how their lives persist through the conduct of office, and how coroners assume responsibility for taking care of the dead. This historical and interdisciplinary book offers a provocative challenge to conventional thinking about the sequestration of the dead in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It asks the reader to think through and with legal institutions when writing a history of the dead, and to trace the important role assumed by coroners in the governance of the dead. This book will be of interest to scholars working in law, history, sociology and criminology.

The fate of the dead is a compelling and emotive subject, which also raises increasingly complex legal questions. This book focuses on the substantive laws around disposal of the recently deceased and associated issues around their post-mortem fate. It looks primarily at the laws in England and Wales but also offers a comparative approach, drawing heavily on material from other common law jurisdictions including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The book provides an in-depth, contextual and comparative analysis of the substantive laws and policy issues around corpse disposal, exhumation and the posthumous treatment of the dead, including commemoration. Topics covered include: the legal frameworks around burial, cremation and other disposal methods; the hierarchy of persons who have a legal duty to dispose of the dead and who are entitled to possession of the deceased’s remains; offences against the dead; family burial disputes, and the legal status of burial instructions; the posthumous use of donated bodily material; and the rules around disinterment, and creating an appropriate memorial. A key theme of the book will be to look at the manner in which conflicts involving the dead are becoming increasingly common in secular, multi-cultural societies where the traditional nuclear family model is no longer the norm, and how such legal contests are resolved by courts. As the first comprehensive survey of the laws in this area for decades, this book will be of use to academics, lawyers and judges adjudicating on issues around the fate of the dead, as well as the death industry and funeral service providers.

This book takes a riveting look at how the law responds to that distinctly American dream of immortality. While American law provides virtually no protections for the interests we hold most dear—our bodies and our reputations—when it comes to property interests, the American dead have greater control than anywhere else in the world. Moreover, these rights are growing daily. From grave robbery to Elvis impersonators, Madoff shows how the law of the dead has a direct impact on how we live. Madoff examines how the rising power of the American dead enables the deceased to exert control over their wealth forever through grandiose schemes like "dynasty trusts" and perpetual private charitable foundations and to control their creative works and identities well into the unforeseeable future. Madoff explores how the law of the dead can, in essence, extend the reach of life by granting virtual immortality to individuals. All of this comes, Madoff contends, at real costs imposed on the living.

Do the dead have rights? In a persuasive argument, Don Herzog makes the case that the deceased’s interests should be protected This is a delightfully deceptive works that start out with a simple, seemingly arcane question—can you libel or slander the dead?—and develops it outward, tackling larger and larger implications, until it ends up straddling the borders between law, culture, philosophy, and the meaning of life. A full answer to this question requires legal scholar Don Herzog to consider what tort law is actually designed to protect, what differences death makes—and what differences it doesn’t—and why we value what we value. Herzog is one of those rare scholarly writers who can make the most abstract argument compelling and entertaining.

The law of succession rests on a single brute fact: you can't take it with you. The stock of wealth that turns over as people die is staggeringly large. In the United States alone, some $41 trillion will pass from the dead to the living in the first half of the 21st century. But the social impact of inheritance is more than a matter of money; it is also a matter of what money buys and brings about. Law and custom allow people many ways to pass on their property. As Friedman's enlightening social history reveals, a decline in formal rules, the ascendancy of will substitutes over classic wills, social changes like the rise of the family of affection, changing ideas of acceptable heirs, and the potential disappearance of the estate tax all play a large role in the balance of wealth. Dead Hands uncovers the tremendous social and legal importance of this rite of passage, and how it reflects changing values and priorities in American families and society.

"Stunningly good. Stupefyingly good." —Patrick Rothfuss Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence chronicles the epic struggle to build a just society in a modern fantasy world. A god has died, and it's up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis's steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara's job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who's having an understandable crisis of faith. When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb's courts?and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb's slim hope of survival. Set in a phenomenally built world in which lawyers ride lightning bolts, souls are currency, and cities are powered by the remains of fallen gods, Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence introduces readers to a modern fantasy landscape and an epic struggle to build a just society. For more from Max Gladstone, check out: The Craft Sequence Three Parts Dead Two Serpents Rise Full Fathom Five Last First Snow Four Roads Cross At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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