Law and Death Heather Conway
Event details
The fate of the dead is a compelling and emotive subject which raises complex legal questions about the disposal and post-mortem fate of the deceased.
Heather Conway of Queen’s University Belfast, an expert on death law, uses cases surrounding corpse disposal, exhumation and the posthumous treatment of the dead to explore how such legal contests are resolved by courts.
Image credit: Davide Ragusa/Unsplash
About the speaker
Heather Conway is a Professor at Queen’s University Belfast and an expert on law and the recently dead. She has researched and written extensively on the resolution of family disputes around funerals, who ‘owns’ the deceased’s ashes post-cremation, and who has the right to decide the form of memorial and wording on a gravestone. She is also interested in new and emerging methods of ‘disposing’ of human remains, such as alkaline hydrolysis, and the legal and regulatory issues triggered by these new technologies. Heather is the author of The Law and the Dead (Routledge, 2016) and is a Council Member and trustee of The Cremation Society. She has delivered numerous presentations to deathcare professionals including the National Association of Funeral Directors, the Society and Allied and Independent Funeral Directors and Cruse Bereavement UK. She is also the current President of the Association for the Study of Death and Society (‘ASDS’).
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