Law and the Dead

Technology, Relations and Institutions
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8153-7523-4
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 141 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 388 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trabsky, Marc

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Australische und Pazifische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Law in the Necropolis

2 Visual Regimes of the Dead

3 The Bureaucratic Logic of Office

4 Dead Records

5 Screening the Corpse

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Dr Marc Trabsky is a Senior Lecturer in Law at La Trobe University, Melbourne.