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Interrupted by Death: The Legal Personhood and Non-personhood of Corpses

James R. Martel (San Francisco State University, USA)

Interrupting the Legal Person

ISBN: 978-1-80262-864-7, eISBN: 978-1-80262-863-0

Publication date: 28 March 2022

Abstract

In In Re Widening of Beekman Street, a nineteenth century legal case in New York State which involved questions of who owned the bodies of the dead – whether it was the state, the church who owned the land where they were buried or the relatives of the deceased – we see an interesting legal aporia. Claims of ownership were complicated by the idea that the dead perhaps owned themselves, having once been full legal subjects. In this and other legal cases in US law (with similar results in the UK as well) a kind of compromise is reached where, as the body decays, the question of its self-ownership becomes increasingly settled in favour of other parties. Yet, even in such cases, the body and its sense of personhood lingers to haunt, as it were, the certainties of law about who precisely owns whom The uncertainties that are made manifest among the dead have their equivalents among the living as well; the presence of slavery at the time meant that in some cases even living persons did not own themselves. In this mix of overlapping forms of self and other ownership then, we see an anxiety in the law, one that it must settle definitively even as the very terms of legal personhood resist the very closure that the law seeks.

Keywords

Citation

Martel, J.R. (2022), "Interrupted by Death: The Legal Personhood and Non-personhood of Corpses", Sarat, A., Pavlich, G. and Mailey, R. (Ed.) Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-43372022000087A007

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022 James R. Martel