Law Commons^™

The Right To Posthumous Bodily Integrity And Implications Of Whose Right It Is, Hilary Young

Marquette Elder's Advisor

The law protects posthumous bodily integrity by allowing people to decide what will happen to their bodies after death. This article asks whose rights these laws intend to protect: the rights-holders could consist only of living individuals whose bodies will become the corpses at issue or could include the dead themselves. Whether rights to posthumous bodily integrity belong only to the living or survive death leads to three types of insight. First, the reasons for protecting posthumous bodily integrity are different depending on who the rights-bearers are. Second, to the extent that some laws are more consistent with an approach …