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Book Cover
E-book
Author Trabsky, Marc, author

Title Law and the dead : technology, relations and institutions / Marc Trabsky
Published Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019
©2019

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; The governance of the dead; Thinking institutionally; Trajectory of the book; 1. Law in the necropolis; Of dead places; The itinerant coroner; Building adeadhouse; Walking in the necropolis; Hauntings of acourthouse; 2. Visual regimes of the dead; Situating the forensic gaze; Super visum corporis (or 'upon the view of the body'); The problem of the coroner's view of the corpse; To speak on behalf of the dead; 3. The bureaucratic logic of office; The technocratic manual
The bone collector and the coronial textbookCultivating an ethics of office; 4. Dead records; A court that keeps its records; Parchment, rolls and files; Making a case of the dead; Embalmed in a citation; 5. Screening the corpse; Shadows of a corpse; Coda; Bibliography; Index
Summary 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
Notes "A GlassHouse book."
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Dr Marc Trabsky is a Senior Lecturer in Law at La Trobe University, Melbourne
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 26, 2019)
Subject Human body -- Law and legislation -- History
Death -- Proof and certification -- History
Forensic pathology -- History
Dead bodies (Law)
Death -- Proof and certification.
Medical examiners (Law)
Coroners.
Coroners and Medical Examiners
MEDICAL -- Forensic Medicine.
HISTORY -- Australia & New Zealand.
HISTORY -- Civilization.
HISTORY -- Social History.
Coroners
Dead bodies (Law)
Death -- Proof and certification
Forensic pathology
Human body -- Law and legislation
Medical examiners (Law)
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781351240413
1351240412
1351240390
9781351240390
9781351240406
1351240404
9781351240383
1351240382