Courting Death: The Legal Constitution of Mortality (Law and Social Theory)

Description

Death is the one ineradicable fact of being human and how we think about it is central to our understanding of, and engagement with, the world. Our human and cultural construction of death and dying shapes the structure and purpose of our institutions and has underpinned the work of scholars and philosophers down the ages. In its organization and values, its form and content, its construction of the past and of the future, the relationship between law and mortality remains one of the most perplexing and undertheorised aspects of the legal system, whether dealing with AIDS, euthanasia, sadomasochism, "mercy killings", murder, the judicial review of the right to die or the criminal death sentence. This collection brings together scholars from Australia, Britain and the US to reconsider the relationship between death and the law, in ways that should be of interest to poststructural philosophers and legal theorists and to cultural theorists and practitioners in a wider field.