Savannah Law Review Symposium CFP: "The Walking Dead"

This is the season for planning symposia for next year, it seems.  I've just received the Savannah Law Review's call for papers for their September symposium, called "The Walking Dead."  Cribbing now from their CFP, the symposium

will survey academic topics about how death, and fear of death, affects the law of the living. What better situs for this topic than Savannah, Georgia—a city both haunted and charmed by the dead, where spectral imprint often trumps that of the living.

 The Walking Dead Colloquium will provide a forum to discuss the “shadowy” legal interpolation of the dead on the living and explore both its positive and negative ramifications in an effort to strike a pluralistic balance between the law of past, present, and future.  Thematic examples may include legal recognition of the dead’s wishes affecting real property and intellectual property; regulation of pandemics from yellow fever to Ebola; constitutional analysis relying upon views of the dead—the Framers—versus a “living” Constitution; and other myriad examples of the dead influencing law: the death penalty; desecration laws; the Right to Die Movement; posthumous evidentiary privileges; wrongful death and rights of survivorship; regulation of corpses, organ donation, and burials; stigma harms to real property inhabited by ghosts; and post-apocalyptic justice.

 Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words by August 1, 2015, to be considered. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions from students, professors, and practitioners. Selections for participation will be announced on a rolling basis. For participants also selected for publication, a completed paper will be due by September 15, 2015. Savannah Law Review’s Spring 2016 Issue will include selected written submissions to The Walking Dead.

 The Walking Dead will take place at Savannah Law School on September 18-19, 2015, with a variety of roundtable presentations and speakers. We look forward to receiving submissions and hosting this exciting event.

 Please send submissions to [email protected] with The Walking Dead in the subject line. 

Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, author of Immortality and the Law, will present the keynote address.  Unsurprisingly I hope there will be talk about access to cemeteries on private property and the constitutional significance of cemetery dedication addresses.  This topic calls out for a paper on the dedication of post-Civil War cemeteries in the south and the south's response to the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The image is Savannah Law School.

Comments

[AProf]

At first, I thought you were calling Savannah Law School the walking dead...