subject: The Law of Death [print this page] The Law of Death The Law of Death
The Law of Death
Once you have been pronounced dead, arrangements must be made immediately for your burial. At the same time, the arrangements must be made for those activities and the performance of those obligations which arise from your death. In addition to creating obligations, your death has created privi leges for those whom you have left behind. The privileges may be extensive or there may be merely an obligation, without any assets or the kind of burial which you would have wanted, and which your family wants to give you. Your death has created the necessity of weighing and balancing many diverse interestsyour own, as far as they are known to the living, your surviving spouse, or your next of kin, and those of society as a whole as represented by public authority. The wishes of society respecting the dead are expressed in statutes, decisional law, and custom which may have the same or an even greater effect than written law.
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The purpose of this article is to give you some acquaintance with the practical and legal principles governing or affecting the death of human beings and the disposal of the dead. In addition, we will attempt to outline some of the pitfalls which you should avoid, and will discuss the rapidly growing practice (and its many problems) of donating bodies or parts of bodies to medical science for research and education, and the granting or transplanting of tissue or body parts to living persons.
Death in its broad sense entails so many and ramified legalconsequences that a book the size of this one can merely outline the problems involved. Full discussions of insurance, tax consequences attending upon death, Wills and inheritance, and executors and administrators appear in other Parts of this book. Also, in a volume of this size, written primarily for the layman, legal research cannot and should not be set forth in such detail as to confuse the layman. However, an effort has been made to furnish guideposts for the further research which the lawyer and the layman will perform together in solving their problems.
