Law and mourning: an introduction / Martha Merrill Umphrey, Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas -- Mourning in America : what's law got to do with it? / Ray D. Madoff -- The mourning after : posthumous sperm retrieval and the new laws of mourning / Shai J. Lavi -- To weep Irish : keening and the law / Andrea Brady -- Listening within the "grief of distortions" / Ann Pellegrini -- Psychoanalysis, mourning, and the law : Schreber's paranoia as crisis of judging / Mark Sanders -- Does mourning become the law? : commodity fetishism and political contestation / Catherine Kellogg.
Summary:
"[This book] brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the many and complex ways that law both regulates and gives meaning to our experience of loss. The essays in this volume illuminate how law helps us to absorb and contend with loss and its reverberations, channeling the powerful emotions associated with death and protecting those vulnerable to them. At the same time, law creates a regulatory framework for death as it establishes the necessity for a clear demarcation of the boundary between life and death, defines what we can and cannot do with the remains of the dead, and creates both privileges and disabilities for survivors. The contributors to the volume also explore how mourning generates critiques of existing legal and political orders which seem compelled by calls from the dead, unleashing an indifference to legal consequences in survivors that can undermine or destroy law." -- Publisher's website.
Series:
Amherst series in law, jurisprudence, and social thought
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.