ADSS Work-in-Progress Seminar #3

What Seeps Outside Sepulchre in the Law of Human Remains

Held on 16th September 2021

The work-in-progress draws on research conducted for my PhD dissertation, presenting ideas that comprise one of the initial chapters of the dissertation. The talk begins with a description of the common law of human remains generally, focusing on historical developments in the common law of England and, starting from the nineteenth century, the laws of Canada, but I occasionally comment on the laws of the UK and Australia given their descent from the common law of England, and their ongoing influence on Canadian law. The act of placing these laws in social context traces an aporia that constitutes experience of human remains withinCanada; namely, law’s protection of remains disposed by sepulchre, in contrast to the other kind of dead body—disposable, instrumental, noxious—from which many ‘formal’ forms of law tends to avert their gaze. An irreconcilable distinction appears in experience between the body as sacred and the body as discard, which this talk describes and which the remainder of my dissertation attempts to deconstruct.

Presenter: Joshua DM Shaw

Joshua DM Shaw (he/him) is a PhD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on laws relating to death, human remains and bodily matters, drawing on critical legal theory and socio-legal theory. Outputs of his research are published in peer-reviewed periodicals, such as Law and Critique, Law, Culture and the Humanities, and the International Journal of Law inContext. He is currently working on his dissertation, Sorting Flesh, Making Waste: A Lawscape of Human Remains.