My friend and NC neighbor Tanya Marsh, who is a professor at Wake Forest Law, has just published a treatise on The Law of Human Remains. Marsh deals with five main categories:
(1) The Newly Dead (including legal recognition of death, presumption of death, obligations to report human remains, inquests and autopsies, and disposition of unclaimed remains);
(2) The Initial Disposition of Human Remains (including the decedent’s right to determine the place and manner of disposition, determining the rights and obligations to control disposition, the nature and scope of interment rights, and the obligation to pay funeral and disposition expenses);
(3) Disposition Options (including burial, cremation, and organ/cadaver donation);
(4) Regulation of the Funeral Industry; and
(5) Treatment of Human Remains (including abuse of corpse, disinterment, grave desecration, the possession and sale of human remains, and funeral protests).
The book also have a fifty state statutory survey of the law in those five areas. My guess is this will be the go-to resource in this area of the law.
Wake Forest has a press release with more about the book. Can I say that people are just dying to learn about this topic?
"Can I say that people are just dying to learn about this topic?"
Good one
Posted by: Kim Krawiec | August 14, 2015 at 04:22 PM
Should be read in conjunction with a new edited volume by Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) http://www.amazon.com/Necropolitics-Graves-Exhumations-Pennsylvania-Studies/dp/0812247205/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439327854&sr=1-1&keywords=necropolitics
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | August 14, 2015 at 05:49 PM