Legal Studies 390D - Law & Politics/Death & Dying

As students of law and society, we routinely find ourselves intellectually engaged with the fact of extraordinary, violent death. Crime, war, police brutality, state execution-- these inquiries bring us to deep and difficult confrontations with human suffering and loss. We will explore questions about rites and rights-- examining topics including terminal medical care, the right to die, the funeral and death care industry and its laborers, and the many fates of cadavers from human composting to organ donation. We will find death at the intersection of bioethics and medical law and faith practices, within feminist histories of domestic care, at the center of environmental justice movements, in the grips of corporate capitalism, in the ranks of a graying incarcerated population, and embedded in economic and racial injustices. We will approach the study of death and law through a variety of sources; case law, yes, and also theory, literature, memoir, art, philosophy, science writing, medicine, and so forth. We will explore serious topics with respect and sensitivity. We will also seek the wisdom of sources that teach us to find humor and beauty in the inevitability of human mortality.

LEGAL 101